After several attempts to boot, and many different tools downloads, rescue boot disks test, etc., I thought I'd try and post here my problem.

My hard drive on my laptop is not booting anymore, and returns the error Disk Read Error, after a power failure while shutting down.

I have used several tools, and I think I gathered as much information as I can.

When I try to boot a live CD, during the partition scan I get the following errors:

hda: dma_intr status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Errror }
hda: dma_intr error=0x40 { UncorrectableErrror }, LBAsect=5, sector=2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda) , sector 2

and so on, with a couple more similar errors on sector 4 and sector 0

If I start up a rescue disk, which includes a Volkov commander with a free fdisk tool, I can display the partitions.

Free FDISK tells me:

Partition Status Type Mbytes System Usage
1 A Non-DOS 15084 HP/NT FS 39%
2 Non-DOS 31 Linux N 0%
3 Ext DOS 2957 Ext L 7%
4 Non-DOS 16002 Linux N 41%

Total disk space is 38154 Mbytes

The extended DOS partition contains logical DOS Drives

Logical DOS Drive Information

Drv Volume Label Mbytes System Usage
1 486 Linux S 16%
2 1004 Linux N 33%

The tool MBRWIZD /LIST displays the following output:

Disk:0 Size=38G

Pos MBRndx Type/Name Size Active StartSector Sectors
0 0 07-NTFS 15G Yes 63 30,892,932
1 1 83-LINUX 31M No 30,892,995 64,260
2 2 0F-EXTEND 3.0G No 30,957,255 6,056,505
3 3 83-LINUX 16G No 37,013,760 32,772,600

TestDisk says:

Partition
number Type start end size in sectors
1 HP/NT 0 1 1 1922 254 63 30892932
2 Linux 1923 0 1 1926 254 63 64260
3 extended LBA 1927 0 1 2303 254 63 6056505
5 Linux Swap 1927 1 1 1988 254 63 995967
x extended 1989 0 1 2116 254 63 2056320
6 Linux 1989 1 1 2116 254 23 2056257
4 Linux 2304 0 1 4343 254 63 32772600

Does anybody know how I can fix my hard drive with a correct boot sector and partition table, considering all the above information?

I am currently running a Rescue Linux from a CD, and running badblocks is displaying many errors of this kind:

hda: read_intr:status 0x59 DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error
hda: read_intr: error0x01 AddrMarkNotFound Lbasect=xxxx sector=xxxx
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector xxxx
(xxxx=number of sector, these messages appear plenty of times).

ide0: reset: success


Thanks for any help.

Joe

That bad, hu? ok, here's another possibility then:

using a live boot rescue disk, I have the network available. Is there a tool I can use to dump out the sectors of my /dev/hda on a network mounted drive?

Joe

maybe, boot from rescue on the affected computer then:
you will have to study "man dd" to work out the necessary options, I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks. I tried dd but it returns a disk read error like the ones I mentioned in my post.

man dd: too many options, I hope some kind soul with dd tweaks experience that reads this post has some suggestions to offer, considering we know pretty much all there is to know about partition boundaries.

Thanks a lot,
Joe