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

[BobW]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Martin Moores <moores.martin at gmail.com 
<mailto:moores.martin at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     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.
>
Spinrite has a money back guarantee, (and honor it for any reason), so 
it is risk-free if it does not work.

That said, when I blew away a partition table, I used photorec on a 
systemrescuecd to scan the drive for files. If found quite a few video 
files, and those that were in contiguous blocks were recovered and 
viewable. (About half of the many TV recordings on my disk.)

At least that would tell you if it is just a partition table that was lost.

However, if your disk is actually failing, this could easily push it 
over the edge to complete failure. (But so will most anything that reads 
the entire disk repeatedly.)

Good luck!

Bob
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