Disk dead after power cut?

pickarooney

One of my hard drives has become unreadable, presumably after a power cut last week. It's recognised as /dev/hdc and the partition mounts to /dev/hdc1 but I get an I/O error when trying to read from it.

I've run all the tests and tools from testdisk and photorec but wasn't able to recover a single file from it. I've got 8000 lines of

file_pread(6,6,buffer,1699842(105/206/40)) read err: Input/output error

I'm wondering if I can just kiss the disk goodbye (two months out of warranty :mad:) or if there's anything to be done to make it usable again?

syklops

I hope you have backups.

Johnboy1951

Did you have smartmon tools installed/enabled?

If so that might give some info about the cause of the failure.

Check how the disk is seen with
fdisk -l

Check reading from the disk/partitions using
dd_rescue /dev/sdXY /dev/null

Check writing to the device with
dd_rescue /dev/sdXY /dev/sdXY
This will read and write back what it reads .... non-destructively hopefully.

(where X is the drive letter and Y the partition number)

You can also use
badblocks
to check if there are bad sectors

badblocks can take quite a long time on a whole drive, so you might wish to check small parts of it.

If you are not familiar with badblocks this page might help as from your post you might wish to do non-destructive testing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/badblocks

Some of the above might help you determine the situation.

pickarooney

Every single block appears to be bad looking at the output from dd_rescue.
This was a kind of a spare disk and there were only about 200GB of files on it, all of which can be recovered from elsewhere if needed so I'm mainly trying to salvage the disk itself at this stage but it doesn't look good.

Johnboy1951

pickarooney wrote: »

Every single block appears to be bad looking at the output from dd_rescue.
This was a kind of a spare disk and there were only about 200GB of files on it, all of which can be recovered from elsewhere if needed so I'm mainly trying to salvage the disk itself at this stage but it doesn't look good.

Even if you were able to recover the drive, you really couldn't use it for anything much, as you could never depend on it again.

The best you could manage would be to be able to write to it in order to destroy the data on it.

A pick-axe and sledge-hammer should have a similar result


On the other hand, keeping such a drive to hand allows one to stay familiar with the various tools without worrying about the result

pickarooney

Kind of ****ting it in case my other drives go in the same way. I'd need to spend a fortune on hard drives to back everything up.

d31b0y

Enjoy your new laser oscilloscope / clock / speakers / generator / wind chimes
http://hackedgadgets.com/2006/04/25/top-5-uses-for-a-dead-hard-drive/

pickarooney

That speaker thing looks cool. I have a total of three dead HDs now in the last 12 months so could go surround sound

Johnboy1951

Cool ideas ..... if the situation was not so serious

pickarooney

Now my / directory (a separate disk) has suddenly become 100% full. It's never been over 50% before.

Dearie me.

There are 30 Gigs in /var/log. Is there a 'clean' way of removing excess there?

edit: kern.log and syslog make up the bulk of that.

Stuxnet

when all else fails try the freezer trick !

can verify it works

pickarooney

Might hold off on the light and sound show... by some unfathomable miracle after the latest reboot my disk is now mounted, partitioned and fully readable.

Johnboy1951

pickarooney wrote: »

Might hold off on the light and sound show... by some unfathomable miracle after the latest reboot my disk is now mounted, partitioned and fully readable.

Possibly a connection problem?

I would power off, withdraw cables from both ends and reinsert them ....... might help in the long term ...

pickarooney

Disk disappeared again, powered off, reset cables, disk was back on reboot...
Which is more likely to be busted - the disk or the SATA interface?

Johnboy1951

pickarooney wrote: »

Disk disappeared again, powered off, reset cables, disk was back on reboot...
Which is more likely to be busted - the disk or the SATA interface?

I would suspect cable connections ...... SATA or Power cables .... either can give back connection.

After that move the connection to a different SATA connector on the motherboard.

The last item I would suspect would be the drive itself ..... mostly because I have never had an intermittent problem like this due to a HDD, but have due to cable connections.