[mythtv-users] Hard drive failure -- recovery method suggestions

[Steve Boyer]

> When I arrived home yesterday, my machine was frozen.  I booted and the
> drive was detected as 4.1 GB, not 3 TB or 2.73 TB or thereabouts.  I was
> unable to run fdisk on it and got an error.
>
> I'm not sure if I can salvage anything at this point and I'm not sure I
> want to spend days trying to grab whatever is left.  There is a cable
> company DVR in the other room that captured almost all of the content that
> I missed over the period I was away.  I lost some movies but I probably
> needed to delete a bunch of them anyway.
>
> I still have the drive here on my desk.  Does anyone have any suggestions
> at this point?  It sounds like the freezer is a bad idea.
>
> I have not tried plugging it in externally yet.  I'm still pretty tired
> from the long trip home (32 hours from waking up in the hotel to arriving
> home and five airplane flights!)  I'll try this again but I'll wait on
> advice in case there is something I should do next.
>
> It is still under warranty from Seagate and then in June it's under another
> extended warranty.  I'll get a new drive if I wait until June, which of
> course may not be the greatest if these 3 TB drives are problematic. :)
>
> I'd love to try liquid nitrogen if I could get access to it.  I used to use
> it at my old job, but unfortunately I don't work in a lab anymore.  It's
> hell on fire ant mounds!
>
> Thanks for all the advice.
>
> Jerry


Jerry, I recently saved a co-workers hard drive that contained the
only copies of his oldest son's baby pictures on it, in addition to
some of his wife's, and wife's family's stuff on it. It wouldn't boot,
and was throwing an error when I even tried to boot off of the System
Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org). I let it take its time booting
off of the CD. Eventually, it did come up. I was able to ddrescue the
contents of the drive to another drive I had lying around. From the
160GB drive, it was unable to read from 284kB. I was then able to use
TestDisk to actually do a search for the partition and recover 90% of
their files. Just my own $0.02.

Steve