On 20 Jul 2009, at 21:20, Ronan Mullally wrote:
> I'm hoping somebody can shed a bit of light in the "tips to bring a
> disk back to life for long enough to rsync off it" department.
>> I've a Toshiba laptop hard disk which has run absolutely fine for
> the past 3 years. No occasional errors, no SMART warnings (not that
> I looked much), no nasty noises.
>> I shut the laptop down this morning after a 4 day uptime. Drove
> into town, turned it on again a couple of hours later and got the
> grub> prompt rather than the usual menu. Further investigation when
> I got home suggests the disk is 100% dead (the BIOS is now just
> saying 'Operating system not found'). It doesn't even sound like
> it's spinning up. I've booted off a floppy and the kernel shows
> half a
> dozen attempts to read hda before giving up.
>> Any suggestions? Any ideas how much a commercial hard disk recovery
> would cost? I don't hold out much hope. There's nothing
> particularly critical on the disk, but it'd be nice to do a final
> rsync before I take the sledgehammer to it.
Give it the cold shoulder. Put the disk into a plastic bag and stick
it in a freezer for 30 minutes, then reconnect it to the PC (might be
easier to use something other than the laptop, depending on how easy
it is to extract/replace the disk from the laptop). This has been 100%
successful for me over a limited sample - others of this parish have
had differing results.
Niall
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