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

Use dd to grab the first meg or so of the drive, and put the resulting file on a usb key or different drive, so your not exercising the failed drive during the next process.

Use dd on the extracted file to search for a partition table, using seek to skip ahead in the file 1 byte at a time until you find the correct offset.

Then you can dd the failing drive into a new drive, skipping ahead that offset, so that the partition table is written correctly on the new drive.

I've done this with a couple of failed raid'd drives, and it has worked for me.

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David Prentice <ak.prentice@gmail.com> wrote:
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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:bryanm@acsalaska.net>
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