On Tue, 12 Aug 2014, Philip Amadeo Saeli wrote: > [...] the drive would not spin up at all. [...] > [...] Any ideas would be appreciated.
If the data is sufficiently important that you're going to go with a company that does recovery, then just go ahead and do that. But if you're at the point of tossing the broken drive, then here are some things to try: 1) It could be a bad controller. If you bought many drives at the same time, see whether you have an identical drive with an identical controller (look at the small print, firmware revision number, etc) --- if so, make an image backup of the good drive, and then you can swap the controller cards without opening either drive. You can also test the potentially bad controller on the known good drive, for another clue. 2) Likely the dead drive is mechanically stuck from the heads not having parked properly and resting on the platter surface. It may even be, as a safety feature, that drives refuse to spin up in that circumstance. We have on a few occasions like that ended up opening the drive and using our fingers to gently move the heads a little bit, then close it back up and tighten screws and plug it in and presto, it spins up! 4) We use GNU ddrescue (read the info pages for examples on usage) to recover the raw data from the drive. You run it multiple times with different parameters (per the examples), and often discover that an originally-totally-failed drive and even one you've physically opened and manipulated, ends up with only a handful of bad sectors! Note that there are two ddrescue projects out there, and GNU ddrescue is the more updated one. 5) On a couple occasions, subsequently re-opening the drive and blowing on it to move some dust around and closing it back up, allowed us to grab a few more sectors with another ddrescue run! 6) Then make a backup of the resulting ddrescue image file, run partitioning tools on that image file to find your partitions, then run fsck (or equivalent for other file systems) on the partition file systems, then loopback mount those fixed partitions, and copy off your data! It all sounds crazy, but we've had success with these methods. Of course, not always. The point is, you only take this approach if you're at the point of taking a hammer to the drive because you've given up, and you've already told your client that nothing can be done and they've given up, this is the point when you can start experimenting on it and see whether you can get anything, and when you do, you'll do a little dance and scream Eureka, and your client will think the world of you. Alex _______________________________________________ General mailing list General@brlug.net http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
