Hi all
This one should be interesting ;-)

I was trying out o&o defrag in windoze xp from the trial download on their site, and about half way through I got a blue screen of death and a memory dump. This happens on lot on the particular machine (laptop actually) because it has very inadequate cooling so I thought it was simply my monthly overheat, thus I did not make note of the stop error

On reboot I get my grub bootloader with options to triple boot OpenSUSE 10.2, Windows XP and Ubuntu Studio as normal. SuSE boots but after checking filesystem for errors (check forced) it says something about disk not ready after the check and hangs, I cannot cleanly power off or reboot because again the disk is not ready. Studio will not boot either after fsck it dies, and don't even get me started on XP after taking forever on loading screen it too restarts without letting me see the error screen.

Windows recovery console cannot find the disk, DIR command at the C: prompt gives error about not found disk or volume or something like that. CHKDSK is a joke to try :-(

So I boot knoppix and mess around with the filesystem I least care about, the one on my studio partition, I fsck it and it found errors about free splace allocation and used space allocation which I said yes to correct. Then when I try to mount it afterwards I can't remember the tool I looked up but I tried to feed the backup superblock(s) into the mount command but still no good. From then on I cannot mount any partitions at all...

SuSE failsafe fails on the mounting part as with SuSE ordinary boot

UBCD4WIN loads, but cannot find the hard drive, backup, diagnostic tools will not work because it cannot find the disk, so I tried "Force load drivers" option and it cut out but I think it just overheated again...

So I removed it from the laptop and connected to pc via USB the following message occurs when it finally displays a drive icon in My Computer and I double-click it, it cannot locate the disk, exact error msg: nodiskscreenie

In computer management on my desktop computer I get the following list of partitions and devices on the desktop pc, which I have annotated in red: diskmanagementscreenie
As is clear I don't think I have missed anything obvious it just cannot be detected by either OS

I have heard of putting the HD in the freezer is this a good idea?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Tom

You can try using testdisk from knoppix.

thanks for replying, I'm actually downloading the latest knoppix now, is testdisk a cheatcode or is it on the boot menu somewhere?

Tom

Neither. load the Knoppix live CD, and mount the offending disk with read-write enabled. Then in a terminal, use testdisk to check the bad hard drive.

testdisk did not do much good it just seems to be reporting info about the drive I already know, any recommendations on how to use it? Fixntfs hung on resetting logfile, so I ran fsck for the linux filesystems and got this:

Seemed ok, then when I ran it again to see if it had missed anything I got:

And from then on I have to restart knoppix to mount any file system. WEIRD?

NB: when I boot knoppix I can access all of my data on ntfs, and ext3 partitions but only in ro, so I can recover my data if worst comes to worst...

FIXED it:

tried all opensource clone tools and some of the big branded ones like true image I could get my hands on, partition table, HD diagnosis, UBCD tools and nothing was happening, it seemed there is a real read-write error to the HDD.
windows recovery console says that there is no system there, so to fix it I used knoppix (of course), mounting the filesystem in ro mode I could painstakingly copy every single file across to another HD using konqueror, as every time it hit an error the transfer stopped so it was a case of copying individual files across to find out which had errors, BUT the only completely unrecoverable file was the page file.
After I had a C:\windows dir I could run chkdsk and after ages it fixed it so I could boot, but cos of the state it was in it was about 90% fragmented and very little software worked, but that is for a windoze forum...

Hi,

Did you try the HDD manufactures diagnostics?

Forgot to mention, its a seagate HDD
SeaTools for DOS finds about 100 errors by 4% completion in full scan (short scan stops with electrical failure warning) it then stops as it appears that the softwares threshold has been reached, it then lists all errors and when I press repair all it states it has fixed the first one and then freezes. It really appears messed up, I've got the stuff I want off it but I really don't know what to do to recover disk functionality, is there some kind of really low level format I can use, that supports USD enclosures?

Hi,
Remove the drive from the enclosure. Put it on a drive controller configured for the system. Run the Seagate diagnostics for the drive while on the controller. If the drive fails Seagate will want the information anyway, so document and save the information.

If the drive is still under warranty then you should return to the manufacture. Be sure to contact and get a RMA.

Thanks for responding,
I should have put it clearer, when I ran the tests it was internally mounted --I don't think seatools recognises USB HDD's? Not in my experience anyway, the disk is OEMed and about three years old if not older, I went to file a support ticket with seagate and they requested the serial which I gave them and they stated as it is OEM its up to the manufacturer (FSC in this case) to worry about, in any case it is well out of warranty, but still within its lifetime within my opinion...

Defragging an NTFS filesystem isn't as important as defragging a FAT32 filesystem. The windows defrag tool should be good enough.