[mythtv-users] [OT] Dead hard drive - no partition table.

[Nick Rout]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Martin Moores <moores.martin at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 1 June 2013 07:56, Chris Finley <debenbain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> You might look at GNU's ddrescue to copy the whole thing to another
>> drive, it will retry sectors several times in several ways.
>> http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
>>
>> +1 for ddrescue, will take a long time to run through a big drive like
> that, but does a great job
>

I don't have room for all of it on the laptop and thought I'd take a look
at what was being produced. I ddrescued the first 314MB[1] of the hard
drive and it is all zeros. Not looking good at all.

Thanks for the help and suggestions people. Not sure I want to spend $US89
on spinrite. Not even sure the platters are moving.

Am I right in saying that the fact that the kernel recognises it as a hard
drive (plug it in and the kernel responds by calling it sdb and even knows
it is 2TB) is probably just the drive electronics, and that the physical
medium could be completely toasted, despite the basic parameters being
recognised? Am I making sense? Is this pinot noir too strong?


[1] not a magic number, just when I happened to press ctrl-c
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