Re: [SLUG] HD fscked?

From: Robert Eanes (rheanes3@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Dec 09 2005 - 16:49:49 EST


If your controller is fouled then you will still be
recieving i/o errors anytime it tries to read. I used
to have this happen serveral times a month at one of
the schools I worked at. We had 100's of drive of the
same type and model. If it was the controller board
(attached to the bottom of the drive), then we would
just swap the board with another of the same kind.
Aside from having another board to swap in, you could
try to determine what the actual problem is. If one
of the chips is too hot, and is freaking out after it
warms up then you can try one of the following:
attach a fan and heatsink or put drive in ziplock and
put in freezer for 30-45 minutes.. boot up and
retrieve data. I know it sounds kinda midevil but it
has works numerous times for me in the past. The only
other option is to send it out and have the platters
mounted at a data recovery shop.

If it's hardware problem (heads crashed, platters
scored) then you should be able to follow the advice
given in this thread and recovery the data that
doesn't reside on a platter with a bad head or parts
of a platter that are scored.

Another thing to note. Sometimes on older drives or
brand new one, the armature sticks. New drives that
have this problem are just suffering from faulty
manufacturing. ie. they made the tolerances too tight.
 Older drives could have accumulated debree and now
every time it trys to go past a certain point, you get
an i/o error or the machine just stops still waiting
of data from the drive. I don't know any way around
this aside from a recovery shop, but the freezer
things works sometimes on this problem too.

Good Luck
Rob

--- Eben King <eben1@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Levi Bard wrote:
>
> > > Can you access the disk using the alternate
> partition tables at blocks
> > > (8192*n + 1) IIRC?
> >
> > How do I go about doing that? Is there a flag I
> can pass to fdisk?
>
> e2fsck has such an option:
>
> -b superblock
> Instead of using the normal superblock,
> use an alternative
> superblock specified by superblock. This
> option is normally
> used when the primary superblock has been
> corrupted.
>
> But in order to e2fsck the image, you have to have
> attached it to a device
> already, and to attach it to a device, you have to
> know where the partition
> starts. A bit of a Catch-22.
>
> I suppose you could:
>
> dd bs=512 if=/dev/hda conv=noerror | gzip -9 >
> hda.img.gz
>
> look at the partitions of a good drive with dd and
> od to see what the
> beginning of a partition looks like
>
> gzip -d < hda.img.gz | od -t x1 --address-radix=d |
> grep <that string>
> (unless you know about where they begin, in which
> case you can speed things
> up dramatically by supplying an appropriate "skip="
> option to dd)
>
> That should tell you where partitions begin.
>
> gzip -d < hda.img.gz | dd bs=1k skip=<partition
> beginning> count=<partition
> length> | file -
>
> Just to make sure you're right... that should take
> only a few seconds. If
> you're right,
>
> gzip -d < hda.img.gz | dd bs=1k skip=<partition
> beginning> count=<partition
> length> > hdan.img
>
> Then proceed with the losetup. Don't forget to fsck
> with the "-b" option.
>
> --
> -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm
> home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
> CAPRICORN: The stars say you're an exciting and
> wonderful person...
> but you know they're lying. If I were you, I'd lock
> my doors and
> windows and never never never never leave my house
> again. -- Weird Al
>
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> This list is provided as an unmoderated internet
> service by Networked
> Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions
> expressed in messages
> posted are those of the author and do not
> necessarily reflect the
> official policy or position of NKS or any of its
> employees.
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:26:39 EDT