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

From: David Prentice <ak.prentice@gmail.com>
Date: Sun Nov 18 2012 - 18:21:08 AKST

Trinity Rescue Kit doesn't help. Yet.

It identifies the Seagate as sda but won't mount it. Says it is part of a
softraid. So now I'm studying dmraid to figure out how to mount the ntfs
partition to recover the data.
On Nov 17, 2012 10:02 PM, "David Prentice" <ak.prentice@gmail.com> wrote:

> This may be worse that I thought.
>
> 1. I can boot an Ubuntu stick, but I cannot find /sda anywhere. That would
> be the Seagate drive. I find the WD drive as /sdb.
>
> 2. Just because I'm a glutton for this sort of punishment, I queried my
> wife and daughters about the errors they'd seen and how long they'd seen
> them for. At least two weeks. The drive has been failing for at least 2
> weeks. The error popups and crash screens had been ignored until I happened
> to observe them myself while using their computer briefly.
>
> Going to try Trinity Rescue Kit next, still hoping to either suck some
> data off this drive or ddrescue it.
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 7:59 PM, David Prentice <ak.prentice@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 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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>>>
>>
>

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Received on Sun Nov 18 18:21:16 2012

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