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Disk Read Error, Partition as RAW?

drizzt81

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
12,361
Hi,

in order to fix my RAID-5 problem, I removed the offending drive from my server, which requires a shutdown, open case...

The drive turned out faulty... but that is for another thread.

I decided that I would need to reboot the machine, since I cannot work without my DC online for the next two weeks. The PC (Dell SC420) boots of a 80GB Maxtor HDD and the RAID-array is connected through a Promise SX4-M card. The Maxtor HDD connects to the SATA-0 port on the onboard controller.

Upon rebooting, I saw a flashy warning for "RAID degraded..." and decided to skip the rebuild (do not have a drive on hand atm). The PC would not boot the OS, but told me that there was a drive read error and asked me to CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot.

After this happened a couple of times, I opened the case, took out the RAID-card, checked the cables on the remaining HDD (disconnected power from the others) and still got the same error message.

After transferring the HDD to my other Machine (thank god for SATA hot-plug) it shows up in the device manager and drive management tools. The drive management claims that the primary partition on it does not have a filesystem and that the drive is empty.

I am now open for suggestions on how to proceed smartly in order not to destroy my windows install on the HDD.

What tools should I run in which order? What could be broken and how can I repair it? I am sure that I will need to replace this HDD soon, but it'd be nice if I got my Win2K3 install off it first.
 
add info:

I ran CHKNTFS on the drive I get this result:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>chkntfs g:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot query state of drive G:

Maybe that will provide some more information!?

EDIT: When scanning the drive with GetDataBack I get lots of "Error 23" messages about 'broken I/O' or similar.
 
Run manufacturer diagnostics on the drive, tell us what it tells you.

You did backup your OS...right?
 
OK, some more updates:

Tried running Powermax v4.09 which does not find my HDD at all. Then I made myself a Powermax v4.2 CD. I tried running that, but after ~20 minutes it was still stuck as "detecting HDDs". Since I need to get some work done today, I am not at home anymore, where I will try Powermax again 2nite, with the drive hooked up to the SI controller instead of the nForce one.

I noticed a couple of interesting things upon having the drive connected to my A8N instead of the Dell board:

1. it gets detected fine on the initial boot screen (when the memory test runs)
2. On the DMI (I think) screen, where all my HDDs are listed, it shows up as being connected to SATA port2, but running in ATA133 mode.
3. On the same screen, it shows all my other HDD's having a SMART enabled status, the perpetrator Maxtor drive says "SMART status... none".

Anyone seen that before?

Yes, I have an old-er backup of my OS install, where I would need to re-add my CVS server and ftp server. Luckily all my Data is on a seperate partition and my CVS gets backed up nightly :)
 
Update:
so no matter which controller I hook my old maxtor to, the maxblast software refuses to find it.

bottom line: drive is dead, now let's see how much/ what data I can recover for my reinstall. Oh well, CRAP :(

New drives are coming today, so I should have plenty of choices in terms of what to have as a boot drive.
 
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