[ale] Possibly bad hard drive

[Brian Mathis]

Spinrite works just fine for the scenarios it is meant for.  ddrescue
looks to be a similar tool, but it doesn't seem to be automatic, nor
does it use statistical analysis to try to recover data from bad
blocks.

Recovering to external media is desirable if you can, but not every
tool and situation allows for that.  It's very possible and common
that one section of a disk may go bad while others are fine.  Spinrite
can recover the data, then you can copy the data externally in a
separate step.


❧ Brian Mathis


On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:10 PM, dev null zero two
<dev.null.02 at gmail.com> wrote:
> you definitely shouldn't give spinrite a try if you value your data.
> recovering data BACK ONTO DAMAGED MEDIA is the number 1 no-no in data
> recovery. just buy a new drive and ddrescue your data to it.
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Scott Plante <splante at insightsys.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> You should definitely give Spinrite a try. Watch the video for a detailed
>> explanation of how it works.
>> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: "Jonathan Meek" <jonathan.l.meek at gmail.com>
>> To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:31:33 AM
>> Subject: [ale]  Possibly bad hard drive
>>
>>
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> I believe my hard drive is about to give up the ghost hard. Saturday the
>> system booted without issue then Monday, I booted the system and tried to
>> start Firefox. The taskbar freaked out and I had to do a hard shutdown.
>> After multiple restarts I was able to get the system back up but at all the
>> restarts, I got a error message that stated that it couldn't find a
>> particular directory and to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart the system.
>>
>> Finally I got the system to give the prompt for entering in my harddrive
>> password (I have an encrypted hard disk that I setup when I did a fresh
>> install of lubuntu last time). It checked for errors and found some, it
>> tried to repair them and hung at mounting /tmp.
>>
>> I restarted the system and this time it rebooted without issue I got all
>> the way to the home screen and logged in. Launched Firefox without issue and
>> goofed around for a few minutes while I let my backup system backup for the
>> final time (in fear of never getting it back).
>>
>> Shutdown the system and restarted it with a Ubuntu 12.04 live CD in order
>> to do check the hard drive. Went into Disk Utility and the system recognized
>> I had a hard drive but when I tried any of the benchmarks it balked at me
>> saying it couldn't read as well as the SMART Status said "not applicable".
>> This might be from the encryption but I don't know.
>>
>> Exited out of the live CD, boot the system again, and it booted without
>> incident. Tried to do software update, it griped at me saying that there was
>> not enough room in /boot to do an update and to use sudo apt-get clean. Run
>> sudo apt-get clean and tried the update again. Same error message. Repeated
>> this step 5 times before giving up.
>>
>> I am not sure what to do at this stage with it because I can't seem to
>> wipe the drive probably due to the encryption because I tried to install
>> Ubuntu 12.04 since I had a backup of all my data.
>>
>> All that backstory was to ask this one question: Is there anything else I
>> can do to give some level of assurance the actual status of the hard drive?
>> I think it is busted but I am not sure.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jonathan
>>