[discuss] RMA fun

[David Bronaugh]

On Fri, 16 May 2003 16:24:11 -0800
"Antony Hilliard" <tonedog at hailmail.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> Anyone have a hard disk data recovery shop in town they'd recommend?
> 
> I just got back from six weeks out of town.  Last night I happily turned
> on my computer, checked my email, apt-get upgraded Debian, and went to
> bed.  This morning I went to check my email and Linux locked up
> completely with the hard disk making rythmic seeking sounds.  After a
> hard reboot the drive spun up OK, but the BIOS wouldn't recognize it. 
> Linux could get the drive identification string "hdc: Quantum Fireball
> AS60, etc. etc. etc." but then followed that with lines of "0x59 - Drive
> SeekComplete DriveRequest DataError" and "error: cannot read partition
> table" before panicking.
> 
> This is my first time facing data loss.  Feels just as good as you'd
> imagine.
> 
> The good news is that Maxtor has agreed to RMA the drive under their old
> 3 year warranty so a replacement will be arriving in a few weeks.  The
> bad news is that this drive in addition to my Debian partition also had
> my storage partitions with photos, old software archives, my band's
> music, all un-backed up.  I'll have 30 days before I have to ship back
> the old one, and I would like to get some quotes to see if some of the
> data can be transferred.
> 
> Any help would be very much appreciated.  If anybody feels like some
> troubleshooting I would welcome an email.
> 
> And to anyone who's been thinking maybe about making a few backups of
> their stuff... do it.

Got a drive of equal or greater size kicking around or available?

man dd -- you'll note the noerror option. I would suggest dd'ing /dev/hda to the other disk (boot it using the install CD or whatever) and seeing what you can retrieve. If you have enough info to rebuild the partition table on another disk, that would b e perfect -- otherwise, look for signatures of the beginning of filesystems and swap and go from there.

You should be able to regain a fair bit using grep and dd. I've been there and done that for individual files on my HD.

Soon as you have a specific partition isolated (start and length) you should be able to dd that to another file and mount it as a loopback FS. Then you'll have your data.

This is all assuming that it's simply the first sector that's shot and not the drive electronics... if it's the drive electronics, there's a good chance that if you have a second one that's identical, you can swap electronics and have some luck.

David Bronaugh
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