[PLUG] Is this a disk crash?

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Wed May 16 05:03:18 UTC 2007


On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 12:13:49PM -0700, TedK wrote:
> So.. Is this a disk crash? . is my next step to get a new disk and reload
> everything? . the Ubuntu Live Disk boots.

When you boot from the CD, can you mount any of the partitions on
the ide drive?  What happens if you do an "fdisk -l /dev/hda" on 
the drive while booted from Ubuntu?

A lot of things can be wrong - loose cables, bad power supply, missing
boot blocks.  Before you give up on the drive, check the voltage (with
a voltmeter) on the 4 pin drive power cable.  It should be 12V on the
yellow wire, 5V on the red wire, plus or minus 10% or so. 

If the power is OK, and the connectors on the drive and the motherboard
are tight (pull and reseat them, just for luck), see if the computer
will boot from another drive. 

It is always handy to keep a bootable small IDE drive as a spare; you
can get a 10GB drive from the Free Geek store for $5, and load it
with a default Linux distro.  In fact, get two, and practice the 
always fun "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=256K" to copy the entire
contents of the first drive to the second (in single user mode).
Now you have a scratch drive that can be destroyed without tears
if an experiment goes wrong (unlike the 500GB drive I toasted two
days ago - always try a cheap drive first!).

If you can boot from the scratch drive, then the power and the
connectors are OK.  Try the old drive on the hdb ide connector and see
if you can read anything off it.   If the old drive is loose and you
can move it with your hand, you can try moving it around gently.  If
the platter is spinning, there will be some gyroscopic resistance. 
If not, try giving it a quick sharp twist in the direction of the disk
rotation;  that might get the motor spinning.  Have a cardboard box or
some other insulated elevated surface to set the drive down on.

After you have been through all that, THEN you can say the drive is
dead.  Drives are cheap these days, and if you need nothing off the
drive you could just give it to Free Geek, but personally I like to
KNOW before I toss a potentially usable drive.

Oh, and before you seal up the system with the old or new drive,
dust and vacuum the insides.  Dust prevents cooling.  Warm days
ahead, and overheating is the main cause of dead hardware.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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