Dead SATA drive

[roger]

My home pc died last night - well, it locked up. I rebooted, but no joy. The drive clicks at about 1.5Hz for a minute, then I get a message saying there was a read disk error, and to ctrl+alt+del to restart. This is all before XP starts up.

This morning I tried booting again and everything worked fine. Logged in, but then the drive started clicking again as the computer was loading user settings, and then the computer locked up. Rebooted, and the behavior in the first paragraph reoccurs (i.e. get the disk read error, xp does not start).

Brought the hard drive into work this morning and installed into my work machine. Configured BIOS and it recognizes the drive. Boot, and the drive starts clicking as in the home pc. Get the XP start up screen with the scrolling progress bar. Screen goes black, then the computer locks up and nothing furhter happens. Unplug drive, and work machine boots normally (except for BIOS warning complaining that it didn't find the unplugged drive).

So, is this drive toast? Any chance at all of pulling the data off from it? I did a bunch of googling, but couldn't find anything relevant. There's nothing vital on this disk, but I'd sure like to pull the data off.

 

[TobiasTheViking]

It sounds like the click of death..

Put it in a linux computer and copy the data... Then send it in for repair.

 

[ShowMe]

Agree with TTC. Download a Knoppix, load it into a computer and copy the important stuff.

 

[roger]

Thanks.

I haven't used linux (though I've done a lot of unix stuff in the past). I take it that the jist of these recommendations is that linux will boot even though windows locks up (why in heck does windows lock up anyway? shouldn't this be multithreaded. argh!). I'm assuming I can just burn a boot CD of Knoppix. Off to google... Thanks!

 

[TobiasTheViking]

Knoppix because it will boot from the CD. so the harddisk is irrelevant.

Then, as far as i know, you can hot plug and hot unplug the hd while the computers is running.

So, boot the cd, plug in the hd, copy the data, once it starts making sounds, stop the copy, unplug it, let it cool down, and retry.

The main reason for suggesting knoppix is just that it handles the hd errors much better(doesn't lock up the system). And that it runs from a cd.

 

[roger]

Cool, just finished burning the knoppix cd. Will give it a go now...

Thanks again.

 

[roger]

Okay, I'm running knoppix as I type, I get "stalled" as the indication when I try to browse it's mnt point. But giving it several minutes and I get a directory. Looks like patience will be the key...

Thanks again, you really saved my butt! (didn't want to have to reburn 300-500 CDs into mp3's!)

 

[monoman]

Hi Roger,

I had a SATA problem as well recently - although different to yours, my drive has been tested in another xp pc and it works.

Anyway, i've just installed the cd version of Knoppix too and can browse freely on my sata drive.

Unfortunately, i can't copy anything to my ide drive as it won't allow me to create new folders on it. It said something about ntfs and try running the "captive-ntfs drive" in the "knoppix-utiles menu"

That's not there. Have you had success in copying data over?

 

[ShowMe]

Okay, I'm running knoppix as I type, I get "stalled" as the indication when I try to browse it's mnt point. But giving it several minutes and I get a directory. Looks like patience will be the key...

Thanks again, you really saved my butt! (didn't want to have to reburn 300-500 CDs into mp3's!)

Knoppix is a wonderful little utility for such things. I keep a burned CD around for just such emergencies.

 

[ShowMe]

Unfortunately, i can't copy anything to my ide drive as it won't allow me to create new folders on it. It said something about ntfs and try running the "captive-ntfs drive" in the "knoppix-utiles menu"

That's not there. Have you had success in copying data over?

Captive-ntfs was removed from recent versions because it was doing things like removing your partitions.

LiveCD distros like Helix or Whax may have the captive-ntfs on it. But you could be risking the partition by using it.

You may want to get a hard drive and format it with the FAT32 file system & copy your data to it, instead of your NTFS drive. Then you should be able to burn to a CD or copy it to your main drive once you're booted into Windows.

 

[monoman]

Captive-ntfs was removed from recent versions because it was doing things like removing your partitions.

LiveCD distros like Helix or Whax may have the captive-ntfs on it. But you could be risking the partition by using it.

You may want to get a hard drive and format it with the FAT32 file system & copy your data to it, instead of your NTFS drive. Then you should be able to burn to a CD or copy it to your main drive once you're booted into Windows.

Thanks for the info.

If that's the case i'll just burn the data to dvd and then move it over to the ntfs drive

Cheers

 

[roger]

yes, as others have written, you can't copy to an NTFS device.

So I went and bought an external USB hard drive. Unfortunately, knoppix is not recognizing it.

So I am now copying my files up to my company's network drive, and have the USB hard drive plugged into another pc where I am downloading the results.

A pain, but it works!

 

[monoman]

yes, as others have written, you can't copy to an NTFS device.

So I went and bought an external USB hard drive. Unfortunately, knoppix is not recognizing it.

So I am now copying my files up to my company's network drive, and have the USB hard drive plugged into another pc where I am downloading the results.

A pain, but it works!

Why can knoppix read a drive that's clicking but windows and dos can't?

 

[roger]

dunno. I know that at first I kept getting a stalled message, but now it's reading fine.

 

[monoman]

I need a program that can compare the contents of a folder on my IDE drive to the contents of the same folder on my SATA drive to see which files are not on my IDE drive so i can copy them onto a DVD - like a synchronization program.

I've checked the KNOPPIX packages.txt file for the CD but can't see anything in there.

Is there such a program on the cd or do i need to download one?

Cheers

 

[voidx]

Why can knoppix read a drive that's clicking but windows and dos can't?

Simply because the Windows OS is installed on the drive that is faulty, and hence can't load the OS before the drive acts up. Since knoppix loads off the CD, it doesn't have to load the OS off the drive, it just mounts it afterwards.

Windows simply doesn't have much in the way of a bootable recovery OS that will fit on a CD. Although there are utilities out there. ERD Commander from sysinternals is one such product. Essentially does the same as knoppix, loads a barebones OS and console off the CD, and then allows you to mount the drive and run various recovery utilities on it. It's not free however.

 

[monoman]

Windows simply doesn't have much in the way of a bootable recovery OS that will fit on a CD. Although there are utilities out there. ERD Commander from sysinternals is one such product. Essentially does the same as knoppix, loads a barebones OS and console off the CD, and then allows you to mount the drive and run various recovery utilities on it. It's not free however.

Thanks for the info voidx. If you know about this "stuff" i'd appreciate it if you could have a look at my thread over here - http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50854.

I tried ERD Commander with my (perfectly good) SATA drive plugged in but got the blue screen of death.
Is there a similar bootable program that can read/write SATA ntfs partitions?

Cheers