[aklug] Re: Wife's hard drive is failing

Status update:
1. Amazon came through. WD Caviar Black 1TB drive arrived today. Woohoo.
2. For those who questioned if the drive itself was bad: it is bad. Really
bad.

Got the new drive. Opened the box and did a thorough cleaning. Pulled the
SATA DVD drive and used its cables to hook up the WD drive. Booted, went
back to diagnostics, and repeated all the tests which gave me SMART errors
on the Seagate Barracuda. Still gives same errors. No errors on the WD
drive. Its clean.

Attempted to boot to Windows desktop using Seagate as primary. It boots.
Hurrah. It gets about to the login prompt, and then the hard drive fails.
Blue screen. Forces a reboot. Computer no longer recognizes existence of
the Seagate. Shutdown. Repeat bootup. Same error.

Drive will boot from a cold boot, but won't get to a Win7 desktop.

So... I go to the AMD RAID firmware setup screen. Lets set this up as a
RAID1 of 2 drives. Thats where I stopped. The old drive was configured for
the RAID as "RAID READY" but never assigned to a RAID. At this point the
only way to assign it to a RAID1 is to delete the MBR and give it a new MBR
as part of an array.

I'm afraid that if I delete the MBR, the data will not be recoverable.
Delete the MBR and redo it as RAID1? Not sure if thats a good idea.

I think the next thing to try is the ddrescue option suggested to me. Never
tried it before. Sounds promising. I can boot from an Ubuntu thumbdrive, so
this should work.

I searched and cannot find the HP "recovery CD" that should have come with
this PC. I unboxed the PC myself, not my wife, so it is possible that it
never came with a CD. I wouldn't be surprised.

Current plan is to proceed with finding a way to mirror the Seagate onto
the WD so that the Seagate can be tossed. Alternatively, I can boot to an
Ubuntu thumb drive and leech the essential data off of it onto an external
drive.

Mirroring the drives solves the problem of what to install on the WD drive.
It would then be a clone of the Seagate and boot Win7. If that proves
impossible, then the alternatives are: 1) torrent a bootleg Win7 iso, 2)
purchase a copy of Win7 or Win8, 3) linux.

The linux problem, for my wife and daughters, is iTunes and Sims3. MS
Office is not a problem with linux, because LibreOffice works so well and a
Virtualbox guest of XP and Office10 runs seamless. Sims3 might run with
PlayOnLinux, but I don't consider Wine to be a solid end-user solution. I
can work around iTunes because all of our iPod hardware is old-gen. No
iPhones, no iPads, no current-gen products at all.

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 6:46 PM, <bryanm@acsalaska.net> wrote:

> On Tue, November 13, 2012 9:31 am, David Prentice wrote:
> <snip>
> > Plan C: new drive, linux install, Wine & Virtualbox.
> >
> > Trying to figure out just EXACTLY what it is that everyone uses on
> > this computer that depends on Windows, that cannot be done from a
> > linux host with either Wine or a Windows virtual guest.
>
> I understand that iTunes doesn't work well under Wine. That was a
> blocker for a co-worker of mine. As for virtualized Windows, though,
> I figured everything (or nearly everything) would work fine there.
>
> Was I wrong about that?
>
> --
> Bryan Medsker
> bryanm@acsalaska.net
>
>
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Received on Sat Nov 17 20:00:13 2012