[NCLUG] Hard disk failure

[dobbster]

Michael Dwyer wrote:
> 
> > I've encountered disaster. :-(  Fortunately, it happened to a fairly
> unimportant
> > machine.  This system is mainly used for backups and storing mp3s.
> 
> MP3s gone?  That is certainly disaster... :)
> 
> Anyway, I have to ask the obvious question:  is the drive spinning?
> Is it making noises?  Is it making strange noises?  Is there a chip
> LED on the actual drive that is flashing... uh.. abnormally?
> 
> If you can't get to any of the master block thingies, it could be
> because the physical drive is dead.  If that is the case, I know
> of no reasonable way of recovering.  There are some unreasonable
> ways, but most of them are silly in this day and age... (eg, drop
> the drive on the bench to unstick the heads, or open the drive and
> manually kick-start to platters.)
> 
> You might also grab a S.M.A.R.T. tester from one of the drive
> manufacturers.  They can be found at Western Digital, at the
> very least -- theirs even runs online.  Strange.
> 
> Good luck!

I've been too busy...that is, ignoring...OK I admit it, I am in DENIAL over this
disk crash, so I've been a little slow to work on it.

I'm pretty sure it's not a physical disk problem, though.  After all:

- It involves two disks, each with VFAT and ext2 partitions, and the ext2
partitions became inaccessible immediately after installation of some Window
software,

- The FAT partitions on each disk are still accessible (and Windows works, more
or less),

I can read the MBR...  I could even run fdisk on from a boot floppy, and it
showed everything correct.  However, it refused to let me mount the partitions.

As for restoring the data...  Well...  I have backups of everything else, except
about 10 GB of MP3s.  The machine was mostly a backup machine in the first
place.  I probably won't bother.

Mark (dobbster at dobbster.com)

-