Quote:
Originally Posted by sj061
Hi Widget,
I swapped all three drives sata cable to different sata ports on the motherboard and still doesn't recognize the drive with the O/S, but if I use the sata port that the O/S drive is connected to with one of the other drives the bios recognizes this drive. My conclusion seems to point to a damaged HDD that houses the O/S. Would you come to that conclusion also? Thanks
Regards, Scott
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Yes that seems to be a fair conlusion. The question is the drive usable is not answered though it may just be shot.
Have you tried booting to a Live Session of some sort? I like the Debian Live Media personally but any would be fine for this. This is just on the off chance that booting from a usb or opical drive that the questionable drive may be seen. Stranger things have happened.
If that were to be the case you could take a look at the drive with the file manager and see what is still there.
Another thing that has worked for me on one occasion was to put a drive in an external enclosure and it could be seen then. Not sure why it worked though.
This sounds like a lot more than a file system fault though. You may have to write it off. Not knowing what you had on the drive that you may want to salvage it is kind of hard to suggest a lot of things that may not work.
One thing would be to try it on a different box too.
If bios can't see the thing nothing is going to help though. It is possible that a different bios may see it though. This is one of the reasons I am a big fan of external enclosures. You can take it and plug it in on other boxes easily.
I do know that, at least on this box, you can mess up the file system so it is not seen. Just not formatted in a way that can be read. I bricked 2 (slow learner) small (thankfully) drives when "playing" with partitioning.
If you can find something that will see it try just formatting a small partition on it. A /swap, say about where your old /swap was. This should make it show up on your box. Bios has to have something it can read to recognize a drive. I would use cfdisk as it does a cleaner job when creating partitions. Gparted tends to have partitions that very slightly overlap. Problem is that if Gparted was used in the first place cfdisk may not open the thing. Gparted isn't as picky and will probably open it if you can see it anywhere.
Gparted is good for copy/pasting partitions to another drive if you can get too them. You could also us the dd command to copy the entire disk to another drive. I think I would use gparted for that in hopes that it would do some file system clean up while at it.
Testdisk is also a great tool for recovering data. I was playing with it one a drive that I had used for Ubuntu-testing and was going to reformat. Recovered an OS that had been over written at least twice, chrooted into it and installed grub on the MBR and it booted.
But to do anything you have to be able to get the drive recognized. This one does not sound promising.
