[PLUG] Is this a disk crash?

drew wymore drew.wymore at gmail.com
Wed May 16 05:14:57 UTC 2007


On 5/15/07, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
>
> 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


I'm told but haven't tried with anything other then a floppy disk that you
can put a drive in the freezer let it sit for an hour or so and it may  work
long enough to get anything you need of it. FWIW it worked with  a flaky
floppy for me.

Drew-



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