[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Mark Shuford]

If you can find another of the same drive (you did say it was only a few
months old) you can try a little surgery...

Get the PC board off the new drive and put it on the broken one. If it's
a electronics problem, rather than physical or corrupted meta-data, this
may revive it for a bit to get your data. Then collect on the warranty
so's you'll have the two drives.

I've fixed a couple of drives like this in the past.

No guarantee... and some chance that it could MUNG what's there already
if the PC board starts writing to the drive... which I don't see a good
reason for, but I must still give the warning.

Probably not for the faint-of-heart.

If the meta-data is hosed then the course is a data-recovery service or
deep digging yourself (if you have the tools and are up for it).




mds


On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 22:22:37 -0400
Owen Berry <oberry at trilug.org> wrote:

> I think that's what's happening. They're on different channels, and I
> tried a few mixtures of jumper settings, but no luck.
> 
> I'm keen to give the PCI controller a try, but I'll have to get my
> hands on one. Maybe now is the time to go for RAID with 2 hard drives.
> Only problem is a lack of funds. This drive is only a few months old!
> Should be under warranty at least.
> 
> In the mean time, anybody know of good/reasonably affordable data
> recovery services in the area, that might have a better go at it? I'd
> have to weigh cost against data, but there are some photos of my 7
> month old son that hadn't made it to a backup yet that I wouldn't mind
> getting back. I see Intrex advertises that they do some data recovery.
> Any idea how good an option they would be? Any location a better
> choice?
> 
> I guess this has become OT, but it did kind of start off as a Knoppix
> question. Apologies to those who mind.
> 
> -- Owen
> 
> On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 20:36 -0400, Jason Tower wrote:
> > a hosed hdd can interfere with other ide devices, i've seen this
> > kind of behavior before.  make sure they're not on the same channel,
> > and be sure to try different jumper settings.  if that fails try
> > using a pci ide controller for the hdd.  if that doesn't work you're
> > probably sol.
> > 
> > jason
> > 
> > Owen Berry wrote:
> > > This morning my wife's computer crashed, the hard drive started
> > > making clicking noises, and, when rebooted would get past the BIOS
> > > startup and then stop with a flashing cursor in the top left hand
> > > corner of the screen. The only good sign is that the BIOS detects
> > > the hard drive.
> > > 
> > > Seems pretty bad. My first thought was to try to recover whatever
> > > possible using Knoppix. Tried booting off the CD, but all I got
> > > was the flashing cursor. Went into the BIOS and double checked
> > > that the CD drive came before the hard drive in terms of startup
> > > devices - it was. To be sure, I changed all 3 options to be the CD
> > > drive. Still the same result.
> > > 
> > > I tried unplugging the hard drive and then booting off Knoppix,
> > > and everything worked fine. Any ideas what I could be missing
> > > here?
> > > 
> > > Thanks.
> > > 
> > > -- Owen
> > > 
> > > 
> 
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-- 
Mark Shuford