[ltp] HDD emergency repair (howto)

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:12:50 +0200

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That's something I'd like to know, too, since one of them contains the
last living(?) copy of my pgp-key for some reason...

Adrian Bastholm schrieb:
> It would be nice to have a howto with pictures :P. By the way, is there a
> way of fixing those old IBM DeathStar drives with the clicking problem ?
> 
> /adrian
> 
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Ted Ghose <ted@ghose.us> wrote:
> 
>> Richard,
>>
>> awesome, I've two of those... let me try!
>>
>> Appreciate it a lot
>>
>> thanks
>>
>> -tg-
>>
>> On 5/6/09, Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> I've just saved a friend's SATA notebook disk, and thought it might be
>>> worth writing up a brief account.
>>>
>>> Symptom:
>>>    Laptop wouldn't boot at all, stalling at the first BIOS screen.
>>>    HDD wasn't spinning.
>>>    Unplugging HDD allowed the laptop to boot via live-CD.
>>>    => HDD faulty.
>>>
>>> Confirm:
>>>    There is nothing else that can be done with this disk. Professional
>>>     data recovery is too expensive. So OK to take a risk.
>>>
>>> Open the disk:
>>>    Carefully, using a torx screwdriver.
>>>    One screw is hidden under the label.
>>>    Clean room would be nice, but I don't have one
>>>
>>> Discovery:
>>>    The head appears to have cold-welded itself somewhere in the
>>>    middle of the disk. The disk can't spin at all. This is the
>>>    second time I've come across a 2.5" disk with this problem.
>>>    User says it wasn't mis-treated.
>>>
>>> Solution:
>>>    Carefully, without touching the platter, use a fingernail to
>>>    force the head back into the parked position. Some considerable
>>>    force (perhaps 10 newtons?) is required.
>>>    Then quickly re-assemble drive before too much dust gets in.
>>>
>>> Recovery:
>>>    Put disk into thinkpad. Boot thinkpad from a live CD. (Mandriva 2009).
>>>    Fortunately, the "dead" disk spins up.
>>>    In the live-CD environment, add the package repositories, and install
>>>    ddrescue.  (Note there are 2 similar programs: ddrescue and dd_rescue.
>>>    I've had success with both.)
>>>
>>>    Mount an external USB HDD. Let ddrescue do its stuff:
>>>      ddrescue /dev/sda sda.img ddrescue.log
>>>    After about 24 hours, ddrescue has recovered all 80 GB of the disk,
>>>    excepting about 5 MB.
>>>    Also, save fdisk info:
>>>      fdisk -l /dev/sda > sda.fdisk.txt
>>>
>>> Extract partition 1.
>>>     dd if=sda.img of=sda1.img bs=512 skip=63    #value depends on fdisk.
>>>
>>>     Mount the partition loopback:
>>>       mount -o loop,ro sda1.img /mnt/tmp
>>>
>>>     Note: it's supposed to be possible to do
>>>        mount -o loop,ro,offset=32256 sda.img  /mnt/tmp
>>>      but I found it didn't work.
>>>
>>>     Note 2: It would normally have be easier to directly extract
>>>     the partitions one at a time, at the ddrescue stage,
>>>     But in this case, the offending disk is a Windows XP
>>>     system, and I want to be able to re-image the OS onto a new
>>>     drive. A filesystem-level copy won't work here. [In Linux, it's
>>>     easy: just fdisk, mkfs, rsync, then fix fstab and install grub]
>>>
>>> Recover data:
>>>     copy stuff from /mnt/tmp
>>>
>>> Re-image to a new disk:
>>>     Plug in new HDD, boot from liveCD.
>>>     dd if=sda.img of=/dev/sda
>>>
>>>
>>> I hope that's useful to someone...
>>>
>>> Morals of the story:
>>>    (1) ddrescue is really useful.
>>>    (2) Linux can do almost anything.
>>>    (3) Even a totally stuck HDD can be saved without needing a cleanroom.
>>>    (4) Having a USB-SATA adapter would be useful.
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>>
>>> Richard
>>> --
>>> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
>>> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>>>
>>
>> --
>> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_:-.,_,.-:**:-.,_,.
>>                     Save time... see it my way
>> *:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_:-.,_,.-:**:-.,_,.
>> --
>> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
>> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>>
> 
> 
> 

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