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fixing a hard disk


jgw
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Filesystem erros, or physical ones?

 

This is a drive out a dvr721 which is based on Linux (older). The drive said it failed and I want to run a program on it to make sure that a)its not fixable or b)define, and fix, the problem.

 

Thanks for the reply.................

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This is a drive out a dvr721 which is based on Linux (older). The drive said it failed and I want to run a program on it to make sure that a)its not fixable or b)define, and fix, the problem.

 

Thanks for the reply.................

There's not much point in trying to revive a faulty drive. It will always be faulty and therefore unreliable.

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If it's filesystem errors, determine what the filesystem is on the disk, and use the appropriate tool to fix it. Could have been ext2 or ext3, but any other Linux filesystem type too.

 

If you don't know the filesystem, we could bork the whole lot.

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Its worth thinking that if its <b>physical errors</b> the best thing is to forget it.... you can repair them but usually a few bad sectors is a start of something bigger...

Don't wanna throw water over it but I did get told this by someone and ignored it and regretted it later (I had no intention of putting anything important onto the disk but .. well it happens)...

If its a filesystem error then you can check the types using fdisk or cfdisk (or a few GUI utilities for "parted" (qtparted/gtkparted etc.)

(If there is nothing on it you want then the easiest is to just make new partitions and new filesystems)

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The best tool I know for physical errors is HDD Regenerator (commercial).

It does a great job to temporarily revive bad sectors and rescue your data, but in the long run the drive will show up more errors- this is almost 100% sure... so you should use this tool solely for data recovery, and not really for "reviving" thw harddisk.

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For determining whether there is anything physically wrong with the drive, your best bet is to determine the manufacturer of the drive and download their hard drive diagnostic utilities. Seagate and Maxtor have them on their website and I believe Hitachi does as well. These, and many other, utilities have been gathered in a single bootable cd called the Ultimate Boot CD(UBCD):

 

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

It's a wonderful tool to have handy.

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As pmpatrick says for those brands. Western Digital also has excellent test tools for its HDDS.

 

Sadly I think you are in line, or soon will be, to have to get a new drive.

 

At the relatively cheap prices they are today, I think that is also the very best option for continued future reliability and data security.

 

Cheers. John.

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I've had colleagues whom had hard disk failures. As soon as you start getting bad sectors or hear the heads crashing into the disk, it's time to move quick and get that data off. Sadly the MD lost all his data, albeit maybe could have been recovered for a few thousand quid.

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Sadly the MD lost all his data, albeit maybe could have been recovered for a few thousand quid.

 

This is a robbery. I was offered the chance to get my data off a 200 GB Western Digital HD (completely dead- no head crashes, bad sectors or something like that- nonspinning, and the BIOS does not see the disk) for just 850 € ... :huh:

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This was about 8-10 years ago. And only for about a 6GB disk too!

 

Mind you, heads crashing into a disk cause more damage, so makes it harder to recover. If the platter is intact, you can easily get the data off if the disk isn't working in terms of spinning.

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This is a robbery. I was offered the chance to get my data off a 200 GB Western Digital HD (completely dead- no head crashes, bad sectors or something like that- nonspinning, and the BIOS does not see the disk) for just 850 € ... :huh:

 

spose backing up is cheaper, and quicker...

 

I lost all my hdd's in less then 12 hours once. My external got knocked off the desk by the dog, and my laptop's internal had just been backed up to it... I managed to backup important stuff off the laptop across the network before it died a few hours later, but I lost a lot of data on the external.

 

James

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