Hard Disk Blues

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I was trying to add a new hard disk to my system yesterday and lost power in the
middle of mke2fs (oh, the humanity...). After cursing my foul luck and
reconnecting my UPS, I rebooted to discover that fdisk could not read the drive,
the partition table seem to be missing. Dmesg is indicating a hardware error,
but the previous partition (ntfs) was mounted without problems. Using dd, I am
able to read the drive without errors, the data that was on there is intact and
the hardware seems to be functioning. However, I am unable to write to the
drive. I am wondering how to proceed from here. Is there a low-level format
utility that I might be able to use to start fresh for fdisk? Can I just charge
ahead with mke2fs -m 0 despite the lack of a partition table?

Here is the error from dmesg:

hdb: task_in_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: task_in_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=0, sector=0
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 0

Any suggestions, advice, blessings, or magic potions would be greatly
appreciated as I struggle to save my data from myself.

Art Brown
- --
- --
There is in certain living souls
A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
There is one lonelier than you.
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Received on Fri Apr 22 13:58:20 2005