[ltp] Is this hard drive dead??

[Marius Gedminas]

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On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 09:08:10PM -0400, Stuart Friedman wrote:
> T43 2687-D4Uwith a Seagate Momentus 160 gb hard drive and Fedora 10 the o=
nly
> OS on board. Working fine for about two months until a few weeks ago when=
 I
> went to POST and then faced with a blinking cursor in the top left hand of
> the screen. Took the drive out, put it into an external USB housing and
> booted inot Windows on the original 40gb drive.
>=20
> When I explore to the Seagate I am told that the format is RAW and that
> there is nothing on the drive. I manage to recover needed documents from =
it
> but now want to either send the d rive back for replacement or format and
> install a new OS. If I sned it back I need to somehow remive the data that
> is on it ( recovered it after all) but is not accessible by normal means.

In Linux, you can wipe all the data on the disk with dd.  (The data
might be recoverable after that, but recovery would be very difficult
and expensive, so this is sufficient for most people.)

> How could i do that if the verdict is that it is a bad drive BTW, I ran
> Seagate Tools and it told me the drive was fine.
>=20
> If the drive is OK, how do I  get an OS on it. Preferably, I would like XP
> and Fedora in it as I now have some work that requires XP. Most of the du=
al
> boot options I see have the XP on first, but I assume there is a way to do
> it with Fedroa and then XP. SO far, Iahvent' found a way to get XP on it
> (this is probably the wrong place for this part of the query), I have
> recovery disks and a slip streamed XP SP 3 disk.

Have you considered using a virtual machine?  VirtualBox lets me run
Windows XP from under Linux, when I need it (rarely), and installation
is simpler than setting up dual-boot (especially in the wrong order).

Marius Gedminas
--=20
Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when
you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse.
                -- Avery

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