[mdlug] Flakey had drive

[R. Kannan]

Thanks for all those who replied (and thanks Rich for fixing the mail server and open up the floodgates). I will try some of the suggestions this week and report back.

-----Original Message-----
>From: "Carl T. Miller" <millerc at cantonpl.org>
>Sent: Aug 7, 2007 9:02 AM
>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
>Subject: Re: [mdlug] Flakey had drive
>
>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
>
>
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