On Saturday 03 March 2007 23:33, Ron Youvan wrote:
> >> Does anyone know how to make the former "not a block device" into
> >>a "block device"?
> >
> > It sounds like the drive has gone beyond being accessable. Can you boot
> > from it?
>
> Works fine, except for the head sticking to the landing zone a bit.
> It's old, but I use it most days.
Try using fdisk -l to list the drive when booted on the 80G. You could also
try booting from a CD and see if both drives are still visible. It's
interesting that you can boot from it but the other install cannot read it.
Can you see the 80 from the 40?
One thing you could try is to move the bad drive (in grub) to a different
controller / channel. Then use something like 'map (hd4) (hd1)' to map the
4th drive as the 2nd (the way it was before we started this.) Note hd0 is the
first drive. That will show if there's a problem w the channel.
You have two IDE controllers and two channels per controller. Keeping slower
devices (drives) on the same controller slows down the faster. So you may
want to have the faster 80G on hda (first controller, first channel). Then
put the 40G and the cdrom on the second controller, hdc and hdd.
The magnetic charge on a drive will weaken over time unless recharged. (At
least on older drives, I think newer ones automatically recharges it's been
too long since I looked at that.
You could attempt rewriting the boot sector. If old drive is hdb then
dd if=/dev/hdb of=bootsect.img bs=446 count=1
then copy it back with
dd if=bootsect.img of=/dev/hdb
If hdb does not have a legible boot sector you can read it from the distro CD
by replacing /dev/hdb with /dev/cdrom or whatever points to the cdrom.
If you get to the point of needing to rescue the drive you can also use dd. If
the old drive is hda and the new one is hdb, then
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4K conv=noerror,sync
This will ignore hard disk errors and then fill the rest of that block with
zeros, thereby skipping unrecoverable errors and not leaving the partial
cluster empty.
Depending on system you can get 30-40MB/sec transfer rate.
To test bs change the block size from 512 to 1K, 2K, 4K 8K, 16K. This will
affect the speed 2-3 times. I saw 15M/s on 512 (bytes) and 42M/s on 8K.
Too large and it will slow down again.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4K count=100
or remove the count parameter and use Ctr-C to break out after a short while.
--Steve Szmidt
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