[KLUG Members] Any way to read this disk?

[Adam Williams]

> I have a laptop HD that has died and I'm trying to mount it on a
> desktop machine.  I've got the 2.5"-to-3.5" adapter and when I hook
> it up and boot, I see this in dmesg:
>     hdc: , ATA DISK drive
>     hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
>     hdc: 0 sectors (0 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=0/255/63
>     hdc: set_multmode: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
>     hdc: set_multmode: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
>     [later...]
>     hdc : bad access: block=0, count=8
>     end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 0
>     hdc : bad access: block=2, count=6
>     end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 2
>     hdc : bad access: block=4, count=4
>     end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 4
>     hdc : bad access: block=6, count=2
>     end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 6
>     [etc.]
> I can see some info about the drive in /proc/ide/hdc, notably its
> model number in the 'identify' file.  But any attempt to look at it
> gets:
>     # fdisk /dev/hdc
>     Unable to open /dev/hdc

Right, the partition table is at sector 0, which has apparently been
tense modified.

> Trying to cat /dev/hdc gets me I/O errors, etc.

Do you know what the partition structure was?

Can you "dd if=/dev/hdc of={somefile} bs=512 skip={somenumber}"?  If all
the damage is to low-order sectors you may be able to fly over it and
then drop down onto valid media.  But you'll almost certainly loose all
the meta-data that makes the filesystem a cohesive thingy.  Is this an
ext2/3 filesystem?  If so they have an auxillairy superblock; so if you
drop the data you can read into a file of the same size as the origin
partition and you can mount it via loop-back, and the local bone-caster
predicts good fortune, you might just be able to get some files.  If
this is reiserfs or NTFS your almost certainly totally screwed.

> It seems like the drive is real close to working, 

And that little bit is so very important! :)  I know the feeling.

> when the machine
> powers up I hear it spin up and hear its arm seeking.  Anyone have
> any idea of anything else I could try, to read this disk? I'd be
> ecstatic if I could cat the whole /dev/hdc file to my real drive,
> and work from there.