John Summerfield wrote: > William Case wrote: >> Hi; >> >> I have a hard disk that seems broken but I am trying to save -- or at >> least save the data on it. >> The broken hard disk is a dual boot SCSI disk that worked. >> * BIOS says that the disk is present and accounted for i.e. right >> name and size even after swapping in and out other harddisks. > > Means the electrical and electronic bits appear to work. I don't know > that the motor has to spin up for this to pass. > > >> * Using Fedora rescue disk, parted /dev/sda says can't read sda. >> * Using Fedora rescue disk, fdisk /dev/sda says can't read sda. >> * Using Fedora rescue disk, chroot /mnt/sysimage can't mount >> sysimage. > > That's one test three times. No surprise that, when the first fails the > others do too. It's likely to be a catastrophic such as motor speed not > up to par, rw head don't move (I'm only speculating, I presume these > things can happen). > For servers that ran for years without shutting down, it was common to have drives fail to spin up after being shutdown long enough for the drive to cool off. The bearings would stick, and the drive would not spin up. (Maybe the heads would be stuck too, but I don't remember a case of just that happening.) There used to be a recommended service procedure of holding the drive 2 to 4 inches above the desk, and dropping it. You naturally wanted to drop it so it landed flat, with the platters parallel to the desktop. This would free things up, and the drive would work fine for years after that. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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