I inherited a old box at work (IBM 300GL P2 400GHz) that's running RHEL3. It has 2 40BG drives and 1 20GB drive. I'm not sure if all 3 were stripped or if they were set up as separate filesystems. It looks and sounds like the 20GB drive died. Problem is, there's some work-related data on it somewhere that I've been told to 'do my best' to recover.

If I try to boot with that drive in, I just got the '1780 Hard Disk Error' and it won't boot.
If I take the drive out and leave the other 2 in, I get the 'No OS Found' error.

I'm currently downloading Knoppix to see if I can do anything with that.. And i'm sorry that I don't have more information about the system setup, but does anyone have any other suggestions? Or am I just boned?

Do you have access to a USB hard drive caddie? Or simpler you could use a LINUX live CD and then try to access the hard drive that way. You should then be able to mount the file-system and access any data. If you have trouble accessing the drive you might need to use a app to rebuild the filesystem.

Tom

Maybe not, I have a friend that had a drive that was unaccessible he used a program called SpinRite he didn't think it would work, but to his supprize it worked.

Also I've heard if you pull the failed drive and put it in a freezer for about an hour, then put it back in the system, sometimes it will work long enough to pull the data off you need. (I've never tried this myself) But it can't hurt to try.

Or if the data is nonreplacable there are companies that can remove the platers and get the data back, but it's very expensive.

I think its a hardware failure not filesystem coruption.

If the platters spin and the heads move, spinrite will probably work. Costs money but if it is work related data, the $89 that spinrite costs is a lot less than the value of the data.

Hi,

I recently had a very similar problem. I found a small little program called testdisk-6.7 that runs under windows or Dos. It is a console application, and although nothing else could access the drive, this still could and allowed me to copy my data out (not rebuild the drive). It worked very well and i would recommend (as i am doing )

Tom