[ILUG] Dead Hard Disk

[ollie at eillo.org]

Hi Ronan,

A couple of months ago I bough a refurbished IDE laptop drive form pcworld.

When I got home I realized it was SATA. (pcworlds mistake)

Its yours for €20 if you want it.

Its a 160GB - not sure sure about the make/model - I can check.

I have no use for it anyway.

- Ollie



On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:20:47 +0100, Ronan Mullally <ronan at iol.ie> 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.
> 
> 
> -Ronan