Re: media descriptor issue help please

[garys@xxxxxxxxx]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Stevens"
To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: media descriptor issue help please
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:04:20 -0700


Hi,

I have a F7 box that works fine. Recently a Windows computer was hit by a
stray 220 volt jolt and the power supply died. I will in due course replace
the power supply and see if the mobo is hooped, but for the moment I am
really interested in seeing if I can recover the data off the drive. I've put
the drive, a Seagate ATA 40 gig into the F7 drive where it lives alongside
the primary (F7) drive, a Seagate SATA 320.

The BIOS correctly detects the type and model of the ATA drive and the dmesg
messages indicate that it is correctly detected. The BIOS messages state the
capacity and interface correctly and say that S.M.A.R.T. is enabled and no
errors are detected. If I set the box to boot from the ATA drive Windows XP
tries to boot and offers a set of boot options. No matter which one I choose
Windows starts to boot then acts as if it can't deal with the drastically
different hardware it finds and reboots.

This leads me to believe that there is recoverable data on the drive but I
can't mount it in F7. Messages from dmesg read in part as below:

ata7: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x00000000000101f0 ctl 0x00000000000103f6 bmdma
0x000000000001ffa0 irq 14
ata8: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x0000000000010170 ctl 0x0000000000010376 bmdma
0x000000000001ffa8 irq 15
ata7.00: ATA-6: ST340810A, 3.39, max UDMA/100
ata7.00: 78165360 sectors, multi 16: LBA
ata7.00: configured for UDMA/100

The drive is jumpered and cabled as primary master

A mounting attempt onto empty directory /mnt/win gives :

[root@localhost mnt]# mount /dev/sdb -t vfat win
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

[root@localhost mnt]# dmesg | tail
Bluetooth: HIDP (Human Interface Emulation) ver 1.2
ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
Netfilter messages via NETLINK v0.30.
nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (8192 buckets, 65536 max)
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock
hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock
FAT: invalid media value (0xb9)
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb.

So it seems that there is an invalid media descriptor on the ATA drive. But
the information seems to not be conclusive because in fact the Windows boot
sector is detected and a partial boot into Windows does in fact take place. I
don't know what to make of this or what to do next.

Ideas? Diagnostics?

Dave

I have an adapter ide=usb with power supply ( about $20 US ) for just such a problem - allows you to read
the disk without booting issues - like a flash drive. Knoppix is sometimes helpful as well.   ----gary

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