Dead HDD

I posted about the Pavilion p6. I WAS able to get a look at the drive but
couldn't touch any of the files. So, as a last resort I popped the drive
into my case. It tried to chkdsk but I bypassed that and booted into
Windows. I tried a couple rescue utilities, the last one being Clonezilla,
and now I can't get my computer to boot into Windows with the drive plugged
in OR boot with any type of rescue media. I suspect the drive is completely
dead, but if anyone has a suggestion as to how I might be able to get to the
thing, I'd be grateful. No, I don't have another circuit board to try or a
portable enclosure that will work with it..

Thip wrote:
I posted about the Pavilion p6. I WAS able to get a look at the drive
but couldn't touch any of the files. So, as a last resort I popped the
drive into my case. It tried to chkdsk but I bypassed that and booted
into Windows. I tried a couple rescue utilities, the last one being
Clonezilla, and now I can't get my computer to boot into Windows with
the drive plugged in OR boot with any type of rescue media. I suspect
the drive is completely dead, but if anyone has a suggestion as to how I
might be able to get to the thing, I'd be grateful. No, I don't have
another circuit board to try or a portable enclosure that will work with
it..

Does your technician machine support Hotplug ?

My other machine, has a BIOS per-port setting for Hotplug,
but I don't understand why they bothered. Older machines
do Hotplug on each port (as a function of driver choice).

The AHCI driver supports hotplug, and you can leave
the drive powered, and only connect the data cable after
the regular OS drive has come up.

That's the only thing I can think of, if you don't
have a USB enclosure to use, or one of those USB
to IDE/SATA adapters.

As long as the SATA ports are using the AHCI driver,
then you should have Hotplug capability. When you plug
in the data cable, of the spinning drive, the drive
should be detected the same way a USB works. If there
is no response, then the drive is dead. A dead drive can
spin, but "refuse to answer any probes".

If you had suspected trouble earlier, you can use
ddrescue to do a block-by-block transfer of drive
contents to another drive. And that doesn't require
mounting any file systems. It just requires a drive
big enough to hold the content.

ddrescue can either transfer /dev/sda to /dev/sdb (whole
drive) or /dev/sda to /home/users/username/bigimage.img
as a file. If the drive is 1TB, you need at least 1TB of
space at the destination.

The ddrescue program is multi-pass, and tries to get as
many sectors as possible from one pass to the next, until
it has copies of as many as it can manage. It uses a log
file from one pass to the next, to keep track of sectors
that did not transfer.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Thip wrote:
I posted about the Pavilion p6. I WAS able to get a look at the drive
but couldn't touch any of the files. So, as a last resort I popped the
drive into my case. It tried to chkdsk but I bypassed that and booted
into Windows. I tried a couple rescue utilities, the last one being
Clonezilla, and now I can't get my computer to boot into Windows with the
drive plugged in OR boot with any type of rescue media. I suspect the
drive is completely dead, but if anyone has a suggestion as to how I
might be able to get to the thing, I'd be grateful. No, I don't have
another circuit board to try or a portable enclosure that will work with
it..

Does your technician machine support Hotplug ?

My other machine, has a BIOS per-port setting for Hotplug,
but I don't understand why they bothered. Older machines
do Hotplug on each port (as a function of driver choice).

The AHCI driver supports hotplug, and you can leave
the drive powered, and only connect the data cable after
the regular OS drive has come up.

That's the only thing I can think of, if you don't
have a USB enclosure to use, or one of those USB
to IDE/SATA adapters.

As long as the SATA ports are using the AHCI driver,
then you should have Hotplug capability. When you plug
in the data cable, of the spinning drive, the drive
should be detected the same way a USB works. If there
is no response, then the drive is dead. A dead drive can
spin, but "refuse to answer any probes".

If you had suspected trouble earlier, you can use
ddrescue to do a block-by-block transfer of drive
contents to another drive. And that doesn't require
mounting any file systems. It just requires a drive
big enough to hold the content.

ddrescue can either transfer /dev/sda to /dev/sdb (whole
drive) or /dev/sda to /home/users/username/bigimage.img
as a file. If the drive is 1TB, you need at least 1TB of
space at the destination.

The ddrescue program is multi-pass, and tries to get as
many sectors as possible from one pass to the next, until
it has copies of as many as it can manage. It uses a log
file from one pass to the next, to keep track of sectors
that did not transfer.

Paul

No hotplug, no enclosure. I wish! I unplugged and replugged the drive
several times, and suddenly, Windows saw it. It opened very slowly--10
minutes--and I was unable to copy anything from it. It sure wasn't for lack
of trying. Once Windows saw it, the rescue CD's were also able to see it,
but evidently the drive is simply too damaged to touch. The file system was
pretty much hosed, and honestly, I think the drive is a paperweight.

I'm back in Windows now, did a quick format on the drive because the file
system was so damaged. Now I'm running chkdsk on it, but it looks fairly
hopeless. I hate it, but I think I'm going to have to tell them they need a
new drive and a copy of Windows. The computer is long out of warranty.
Might be a good time to pop a couple SSD's in the thing, assuming his PS
will support another one. Or he could go to Amazon and get a nice
reconditioned W7 box for about $75 with shipping.