On 2010-10-17 12.57, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
Summary
-------
My primary laptop ("nitrogen") died, so I moved its disk to a backup
laptop ("oxygen"). That laptop then died. :( I have now moved the
former-nitrogen-disk to an external enclosure so that I can access my
files via USB from still another laptop ("silver").
[snip]
What's suspicious is that I get this identical message (including the
exact same sector numbers) for *any* partition. While I could certainly
imagine that whatever broke nitrogen and oxygen managed to corrupt the
disk contents, it seems implausible that it would garble the exact same
list of sectors on each of several different FFS partitions.
As Otto mentioned, the sectors referenced are relative to the partition
offset, so they would probably be the same (for equally formatted
partitions) if few sectors are readable on the disk as a whole.
Further details
---------------
* oxygen and nitrogen are both Thinkpad T42 laptops, and were running
4.6-stable/i386; dmesg below
* silver is an HP Pavillion dv4, freshly installed with 4.7-release/i386
from the CD set
* I know silver's USB system& the USB cable are ok, because I just used
them (including the same USB cable) to recover a week-old backup copy
of my home directory from an (another) external USB disk
* the former-nitrogen-disk is a Hitachi HTS541616J9AT00 160GB 2.5" PATA
disk. The external enclosure is labelled "Rocketfish RF-PHD25 2.5"
Enclosure kit for hard drives"; it (and the disk within) is powered
via the USB connection.
Something I've noticed with several external USB enclosures is that they
may require more power than the USB ports are able to deliver. If you
have marginal power, the hard drive will most probably be less than
cooperative with the host, in more or less subtle ways. (Such that one
USB enclosure/disk may work and another fail on the same hardware, for
example.)
I suggest that you, if you haven't already, try to add external power to
the USB enclosure (most 2 1/2" enclosures have an input for +5V), or try
using a USB Y-cable that draws power from two USB connectors on the host.
Another quirk that some laptops have is that max usable current can be
different on different USB ports, so one quick thing to try is to test
the other ports on the laptop as well.
Regards,
/Benny
--
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