[nylug-talk] Dead hard drive

[alex@pilosoft.com]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> After booting my computer with this (PATA) drive hooked up, I found that
> none of the partitions were mountable.  The drive produces the infamouse
> "Drive seek" errors.
does it see any partitions? does it detect the drive altogether?

> I tried using dd_rescue to read the raw partitions (/dev/hdd[1-4]) and got
> I/O errors.  Nothing.
> 
> I tried using dd_rescue to read the drive device (/dev/hdd) and it
> started to read the drive, however, I stopped it since my concern is
> that if the drive died due to a hard crash, whatever caused that crash
> may be doing more damage as the platters spin.  Perhaps that's even why
> that Windows program saw filenames and I can't with Linux.
its not a big deal to read the drive. although, you want to do it only 
*once*.

> Does NYLUG have installfests where I can take this drive and perhaps
> have another person look at it to give me a 2nd opinion?  I want to tell
> my friend the drive is toast, and if the Windows program works, buy it
> and use it.  But I'd like to get a 2nd opinion before I admit I couldn't
> do something with Linux that he could do with Windows.  Rubs me the
> wrong way.
there are whole sets of programs dedicated to data recovery. it not 
windows vs unix - those programs are generally DOS-based (like PC3000), 
and they directly access HDD controllers. Regretfully, I don't have much 
time to help you with these. :(