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.
* 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.
* fdisk /mbr says can't fix mbr. ( I am not sure whether this
message means that nothing is wrong with the mbr or that it is
beyond repair )
I would like to do any of the following:
* get the hard disk working again, or,
* view the data on the disk, and/or,
* rescue the data on the disk.
What should I try next?
I have read the other responses and have a few suggestions.
1. If you have a drive carrier, put the drive in it and see what
happens. As Msquared state, changing the orientation of the drive
worked for him. Maybe having the drive on it's side will work long
enough to get the data off.
2. If you can get the drive to spin, there are tools to make an image
of the drive. This will give you something to work with. ddrescue
comes to mind.
3. Once you get an image, you can mount the image and see what you can
pull off the drive. Then there are tools like "foremost" to scan for
data. Note, foremost uses file header info to find the files. Also
block size makes a big difference.
There are reports of putting a drive into a freezer helps get things
working again.
If the data isn't important, then I would toss the drive. If the data
is important, and you make it sound like it is, then you have to spend
some time working.
Look for HELIX and Sleuthkit as two other tools.
--
Robin Laing
