[mdlug] Flakey had drive

[Carl T. Miller]

R. Kannan wrote:
> The hard drive on my desktop has become flakey. Sometimes, it boots fine
> but fails to access data. When I booted on knoppix CD, knoppix recognized
> the partitions and set up the fstab file correctly but I could not mount
> the partitions.the 'mount' command just hung in there. I tried 'cfdisk'
> but it couldnot find the hard disk.
>
> Is there a way to try and do a fail-safe access just to get at the data
> (disable dma etc.)? Any advice is appreciated.

I'm not sure what I would do in this situation.  Normally if
a hard drive is getting flakey, I'll boot from a Knoppix CD
and use dd to make a copy of each partition of the drive.
You can then safely experiment with the copies.

You may want to run gpart (it's on the Knoppix cd) to see
if the guessed partition table matches the partitions found
at boot time.  If they don't match, I'd back up the current
MBR (not to the same hard drive!), write the new values with
gpart and reboot.  It's possible that will fix everything.
If not, you can write the old MBR back and it will be just
like you found it.

c