Hi Folks,

I have a failed 80GB Toshiba hardrive.

I've put it in an external usb enclosure and have tryed connecting it to both a windows server as well as my Fedora 8 laptop.

On the fedora laptop, when I plug in the drive I hear it click maybe 10 times and spin up. After that I hear no noise indicating head movement, but the drive is def. spinning and generating heat. Linux never sees it under fdisk. I've rebooted the laptop with the USB drive still plugged in but it has no effect.

When I look at /proc/partitions I see the drive as "/dev/sdb" however fdisk doesn't show it.

When I did through /sys/block/sdb I see information on the drive...

Anybody have any ideas of anything else to try to get my data off the drive? Anybody have any idea of what component on the drive failed?

Oh yeah, the windows box sees that new hardware was plugged in but never shows the drive under device manager.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

type as root cfdisk and also -l fdisk type dmsg and see where sdb or sdb1 is. cfdisk /dev/sdb
as root type mount make a folder /mnt/sdb1 and and if it is a linux format mount -t /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 ext3 noauto,rw,users 0 0 if it is a linux format then it will be sdb1 windows the -t is a command that is short for touch it means if the /device/sdb1 exists then mount it in folder /mnt/sdb1.

FYI, actually the -t option is to specify the file system type i.e. vfat, ext2 etc.
If omitted the mount command will attempt to determine the file system automatically.

Have you verified the jumpers on the drive? Is this an IDE or SATA drive? Some enclosures require an IDE drive to be configured as master. There could be several problems with the drive and no way of knowing exactly. You can find different troubleshooting ideas by just googling. If it is a heat problem sticking it in the freezer for a short time might be enough to let you copy the data. If a component on the circuit board has failed you might be out of luck. Depending on how valuable the data is you can pay (not cheap) a hard drive recovery company.

if that is what you think that's cool I use -t for touch now for many years. I guess in that script it is -t for you. touch for me sugar in your -t. just a touch.

cfdisk doesn't show anything other then my main drive (sda).

Here is the output in /var/log/messages after plugging in the usb drive:
This is a SATA drive so there are no jumper settings that would matter here. This was the only drive in a laptop when it failed, so i took it out and put it in a usb sata enclosure to ease my troubleshooting.

Thoughts? Thanks for the ideas thus far.

Under /sys/block/sdb
It sees the major and minor number.... however:
And there is no "sdb" under /dev, or any device with that major/minor number.

I can even get more info from it out of sys....
I tried manually creating /dev/sdb with the major and minor number from above...
That didn't work either, fdisk would just hang when I ran a fdisk -l. cfdisk wouldn't show it. and if I tried to do a dd out of it then it would just hang too.

I know the drive is bad, I was hoping I would still be able to get stuff off of it. Does anybody know based off of what the symptoms have been for me what kind of failure this might be on the drive?

Put it back in your laptop and try spinrite. Finding /dev/sdb doesn't really help you since no partitions are found. It just means the drive is recognized (and it might just be recognizing the USB interface) but the drive can't be read.

Spinrite will save it if anything can; if spinrite doesn't save it I don't know of anything that will.

I would try either testdisk or foremost and recover whatever data you can get from it, but it may be already dead, in which case ... hope you backed up.

Actually, testdisk might indeed be worth a try. If it can read the drive at all, it might be able to identify partitions. if it can't read the drive, then spinrite is the only remaining choice.

So just curious... if the drive can't be seen then how is spinrite going to do anything? Thanks for the replies.

It depends on why the drive isn't seen. Spinrite operates within the framework of a very rudimentary operating system, and operates directly on the hardware. This gives capability that doesn't exist within a more sophisticated OS; such capability is explicitly denied.

The author of spinrite formerly worked in the HD industry, as a designer. He knows how they work in great detail, and spinrite takes advantage of that knowledge. if the drive isn't seen because the interface is bad, spinrite can't do anything. Similarly if the platter won't turn or the heads won't move. But if those things do work, then there is an excellent chance that spinrite will be able to recover the drive, at least temporarily.

A hardware trick

Depending on the fault, a failing HDD can sometimes be temporarily rejuvenated by putting it in a plastic bag and putting it in the freezer. This increases the critical dimensions between the moving parts, since the coefficient of expansion of the materials is proportional to temperature. They shrink. Google for the details.

Thereafter reinstall the HDD and immediately use dd or something like Clonezilla to make a copy to another HDD.

Good Luck

Interesting, I've never heard of this, but it may work:
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/200...over-data.html

They say they got 2 minutes out of a dead drive ... work fast

I tried the freezer trick but it didn't make a difference. The hard drive showed the same behavior. Actually it seemed to stop spinning after first booting it up. Interesting.

Has anyone bought a similar drive off of ebay and replaced the external circuit board with any success?

Thanks for the thanks.

I'm sorry the freezing trick failed. I have heard of cooling a HDD for up to 24 hours, and holding it cold with an ice pack.

Oh well, did you really expect it to last forever?