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

[Hika van den Hoven]

Hoi Jerry,

Tuesday, April 28, 2015, 8:36:28 PM, you wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Mark Perkins <perkins1724 at hotmail.com>
> wrote:

>>
>> I believe testdisk can be used to recover the MBR and partition tables, if
>> you wanted to try. Wouldn't take a lot of time to try and would be
>> interesting to know.
>>
>>
> I used testdisk once before to fix a problem I had on a Windows machine.
> It looks like it's not going to help me here, as it sees the drive as
> having 4.1 GB again, and the search for the partition table runs and runs.
> I did try it yesterday with the same result.

The 4GB is an even older BIOS limit. Normally Linux ignores the BIOS
and accesses a disk directly. The fact that it comes up with these two
values (4 and 137) definitely suggests that the drive is not properly
communicating and that Linux falls back to old alternatives through
the BIOS. I therefor think it very possible that the electronics on
the drive are damaged. If so and if the drive is not too new and if
you have a similar drive, switching boards might make the drive
accessible. Earlier someone on this list said that with the newest
drives the boards are hard coded to the physical drive. So it's not
guaranteed to work. I last year rescued that way the data of a 500 GB
drive.

> I will put the failing drive on my desk for now.  I haven't run
> find_orphans.py because of the very slight chance I might resurrect some
> recordings.  I might do that soon.  The new drive is chugging away.
> Usually, I can at least mount the bad partitions and snatch what I can as
> fast as I can, but this time I didn't get that chance.

> I'm glad I got the extended warranty from Newegg.  It was about 30 dollars
> for 3 years after the manufacturer warranty ends.  It will pay for itself.
> I don't normally get them but I do purchase them for hard drives.




Tot mails,
  Hika                            mailto:hikavdh at gmail.com

"Zonder hoop kun je niet leven
Zonder leven is er geen hoop
Het eeuwige dilemma
Zeker als je hoop moet vernietigen om te kunnen overleven!"

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