[nylug-talk] hard drive failure

[Paul Robbins]

I had a linux box with a 7GB master disk and a 80G slave drive.  Over the
weekend, I tried to access something off the slave drive and it showed
nothing on the disk. I tried to unmount it, but got an error.  After some
other attempts to mount or unmount the drive, i decided to reboot to see if
it would get re-initialized on boot.  Instead, when it came back up, it
tried to boot off of the NIC card, ignoring both of the hard drives. When I
would disconnect the slave drive from the cable, the system would boot from
the master drive without a problem.  I also tried to boot using Knoppix to
see if the drive would be recognized that way, but it was not.  I have DVD
backups of the critical files, but I don't want to lose a drive if ther is
an easy solution.  Generally, the Knoppix option works for me to at least
pull off the data I need from a bad drive, but I haven't seen it fail to be
recognized at all. Is this a sign of no power getting to the drive? Any help
or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.