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

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:25:44 +0200, you wrote:

>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.

It is pretty new, well beyond the date that switching the electronics
boards would work.