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another HD failure in progress... recommended steps?

O

orangezero

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 4, 2003
Messages
211
Hello,

My friend's seagate 7200.7 80gb sata is no longer working. It took forever for the dell to recognize it in the bios, and wouldn't load windows at all. Sometimes it wouldn't recognize it at all. He had used the included utility and it came back an "error 7" or something similar, which basically means a hard drive hardware issue/failure.

So, I took it out, put it in my machine and tried to use some data recovery (same old story, he had 3yrs of pictures, all his itunes, no copies in other locations.....). I used two different data recovery programs. Both worked for a bit, but then BSOD my computer. I'm at the point now where I've found a few more programs to try to get something from it before it completely dies on me. But, I can usually get my motherboard to recognize the drive. When it does, I haven't been able to get into windows at all now.

I'm wondering if I should wipe the MBR? Would that help in this situation at all? I thought basically what I needed to do was get a program that would find the bad sectors and force it to ignore those areas.

I have the ultimate boot cd. Some of the hard disk utilities on there cause an error message as well, but I am able to load them. There are some that can overwrite the MBR and thought it may be worth a shot before I give up.

any ideas?? Like I said, it still is recognized by both computers, most of the time. But now won't load into windows... :(

thanks for any help or insight.
 
disconnect the drive and put it in the freezer in a sealed plastic bag (to prevent moisture from accumulating). pull it out after about 90 minutes

now in the mean time, set up your computer with the fastest method for copying. basically, just have a 2nd hard drive connected, formatted/space cleared and ready to go.

after the HD is cold, pull it out, and insulate it with a towel or something (helps with moisture too.) plug it in, and copy the data as fast as you can.

then you should be good
 
And if it is causing problems booting windows on a machine with it as a slave drive, grab a Live Linux CD. Mount the hdd, mount a windows share on another machine, copy the files over lan. You can also just put a data drive (FAT32) in the same system and copy things over. I highly discourage writing to a NTFS drive.
 
thanks for the replies.

a few questions, since I have very little linux experience. I'm almost positive the drive is ntfs. Are you saying to boot linux on a cd with the hard drive in it, and then access it over the network from another windows computer? Do boot cd's include ethernet drivers, or wireless card drivers? I'm not so sure I could do all that myself, I really am a linux avoider right now.

maybe I misread you.

thanks.
 
Here are the instructions(assumes you only have a single HDD in the system and you have a shared folder on a windows machine with basic filesharing):
Boot with Live CD (Ubuntu preferred since it probably already has the drivers you need)
At the command prompt
sudo mkdir /mnt/hdd
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hdd -o ro (/dev/sda1 if its SATA)
sudo mkdir /mnt/smb
sudo mount -t cifs //I.P.ADDRESS.HERE/SHARENAME /mnt/smb -o username=yay (the username is just filler, but required)
sudo cd /mnt/hdd
sudo ls -l (this will give you a directory listing to make sure it mounted right)
sudo cp -R /mnt/hdd/Documents\ /and\ /Settings/USERNAMEHERE /mnt/smb (you can press tab after typing Docu and it will autocomplete)
 
i do this a lot at work, and found the best way is to use a usb sata or ide controller, so you can have your os booted, and just have it mount, gives you more time, before the drive fails......
 
thanks again, i was hoping to do this as well, but have about five ide to usb adapters and no sata ones.. :(

I'm starting to think that maybe heat was the enemy, since it worked early in the day and the didn't after I tried to use it for a while. I've got it wrapped in several freezer bags, sitting on some corn dogs right now. will try that before i bust out the linux.

thanks again all.
 
ok,

I'm downloading ubuntu cd now. I was wondering if it would be ok to just put all the info to a usb harddrive that i attach to the same computer instead of using my network drives. I'm pretty sure all my network drives are nfts and i heard there was some incompatibility with linux writing to ntfs (like a previous poster stated also).

if not, i'll try the network. that always seems to add 10x the complications for me though...

thanks,
 
Writing to NTFS under Linux is unsafe, but writing to network shares (SMB) means that the other computer is in charge of writing to the filesystem. So it's safer, actually, to write to the network than to a local NTFS disk.
 
ubuntu seems to stick at "mounting root file system..."

edit: change above "seems to stick" to "takes an ***load of time" , ha

we'll see


getting "ata1: stranslated ata stat/err " and buffer i/o error on device sda.

to be expected i suppose
 
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