Hard drive recovery advice needed.

[reddragdiva]

arkady has had her third IBM DeathStar laptop drive give the clickety-click of doom. Now it's displaying the following symptoms:

• When trying to boot into Windows, it keeps repeating the same reading clatter over and over ... sounds normal except it repeats forever.
• When we boot into an Ubuntu Breezy live CD and try mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /mnt , it gives: mount: /dev/hda1: can't read superblock . (We think it's FAT32 — when we try mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt, it gives wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, missing codepage or other error.) We tried parted and that can't make head or tail of the superblock either.

Now then. We would like very much to recover the data on the drive. Does FAT32 do something sensible like litter spare copies of the superblock about the drive? Is there something else we can do?

And who the heck else makes drives any more, and do any of them have 2.5" drives rated for 24-hour use in hot environments? _nicolai_ has mentioned Hitachi, but them holding the DeathStar licence leaves us understandably reluctant ...

Comments

[feyeleanor.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear this. I've been using IBM/Hitachi TravelStar drives exclusively for about five years now as I had the same experience with Fujitsu so I know how frustrating this can be.

If you track down a recent copy of Hiren's Ultimate Boot CD there are some Russian utilities included for reconditioning dead drives - although depending on the size of the drive and the amount of damage you might well be looking at several sessions extending over dozens of hours.

I can highly recommend the Hitachi 7K60E and 7K100E drives, which are their 7200RPM 2.5" server drives. Not only do they dramatically improve system performance, they're also incredibly robust and long-lasting.

Incidentally if all three drives have failed in the same machine you should probably consider that there's something wrong with its drive controller.

[reddragdiva]

We had two fail with the clickety-click of doom in the previous laptop (an A30), so we did assume it was the machine killing the drives. That this one has gone in the replacement T23 is most ... annoying. But gives us hope for the other laptop!

That's two recommendations for the Hitachi server drives, so we might give them a serious try.

We assume the drive will work long enough to get the data off if we can restore the superblock. (I'm ass-u-me-ing the word "superblock" means on a PC something like what it means on Solaris UFS.) Then the drive gets sent to David's Circular Rest Home for Drives That Get Pissy.

[feyeleanor.livejournal.com]

With FAT32 I believe that the superblock is nothing more complicated than the two File Allocation Tables, which if both of them have corrupted will leave you with a mammoth recover job.

[reddragdiva]

Arghfucketyfuck. *ahem* Fabulous!

The disk (a) wasn't full and (b) had recently been defragmented, so it's possible the files are mostly contiguous and something might be recoverable from a dd dump. Cross fingers.

[feyeleanor.livejournal.com]

I must admit that it's years since I last had to salvage an kind of FAT partition, but there are definitely file recovery tools out there with a high probability of rebuilding the directory structure and original files. Obviously this is one of those cases where Google is your friend :)

Anyway best of luck!

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

http://hjem.get2net.dk/rune_moeller_barnkob/filesystems/fat32.html might be of some help, but it would appear that if there is a backup boot sector, you need to be able to read the real boot sector to find it! I'd probably dump one or two cylinder's worth and look for the MSWIN4 or FAT32 identifiers to find a possible boot sector, then inspect that to see if it appears to point to two reasonably-identical FATs... It's been many years since I examined FAT in detail though.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't that be mount -t vfat for a fat32 fs? I'm booted in windows at the moment to play games so I can't check the man page.

If the machine was originally w2k or w xp it will probably be ntfs. If it was originally w9x it will probably be FAT32 or 16. If it was w9x upgraded to w2k it could be either. You probably know this already but I thought I would mention it since you seemed confused as to which file system it was.

One thing I can suggest is that if you're getting clatter of doom you might consider dd to make a complete copy of whatever crap the OS thinks is on there to some external device if you have the possibility?

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, dd seems a good idea. Though getting the drive out of a T23 is rather more fiddly than it should be. (Compaqs! Compaqs are so easy to work on! Even the little ones! Of course, they need to be easy to work on.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

If you have any kind of external hd you could use that. My feeling with a failing hd is that any time I spin it up I'm potentially making the problem worse.

Tools on here might help.

http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

See my interview with Payam Taloo on these issues.

Note the comments: "We try not to use the brands IBM, Hitachi, ... They... have a high failure rate, especially IBM Travelstar notebook disks".

Dual boot is also a path to disk damnation, especially with FAT32 the primary.

If you have an IBM Travelstar I'd recommend changing the IBM drive to a Western Digital or Toshiba drive. If you're going to dual boot don't use FAT32.

[reddragdiva]

It's a Windows 2000 installation because Arkady has Windows software she uses, and the license is a sticker. She used the installation that was on it when it was sent to her (hmm), so we don't actually know if it was FAT32 or NTFS. w00t!

The above is the second recommendation I've heard to use the Hitachi server drives, so we'll probably give those a spin (ahahahaha).

[mr-e-cat.livejournal.com]

To the best of my knowledge Windows 2000 was based on the old windows NT system and should be NTFS

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

so we'll probably give those a spin (ahahahaha).

Good to see you're still laughing... Or hysterical.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

One of the drives that failed is a Toshiba - but that was in the A30 and was a replacement drive after the Travelstar went west. The Toshiba drive conked out a bare month after being installed, which is why I initially thought (and still consider it a possibility) that the A30 hard drive controller might be at issue here.

I don't know what brand of hard drive is in the T23, as it's not as easy to extract a hard drie from a T23 as it is an A30 (no nice convenient UltraBay), but it's failed in the exact identical way the others did - first multiple BSODs (usually kernal errors), then failed to find the OS on booting, and now you just get a blank screen whilst the hard drive clicks in the same "rattle-rattle-click, rattle-rattle-click" pattern of a hard drive trying to find its arse and failing utterly, which is precisel how the other two went.

[reddragdiva]

We'll try a Hitachi server drive and see if the problem is in fact that you're cursed ;-p

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That seriously sucks. I think you may be right about the controller.

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

I've looked at the old laptop disk - a Samsung Spinpoint - which I'll put into use sometime this week again.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Obvious thing, but it's easy to overlook things when ARGH THE STUPID FUCKER ISN'T WORKING: Are you sure it's the first partition? If she's running as-installed, I wouldn't be surprised to see a restore or suspend-to-disk partition at the front, and it'll show up as C: regardless.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If you're not sure what flavour of filesystem it is, file -s /dev/hda1 might help.

I've no particular knowledge about recovery techniques (I have backups so I don't have to...) but it strikes me that taking a complete-as-possible image of the block device would be a good idea before the physical disk deteriorates any further.

[untermensch.livejournal.com]

If the data is really important, you should "obtain" a program called GetDataBack (there are 2 versions: 1 for NTFS and 1 for FAT32) and leave it running for a few hours. You'll need to plug the drive into another box onto which you have installed GetDataBack (I assume you have a USB caddy laying around).

It works very well, scanning through the drive for filesystem info clusters (not everything lives in the FAT or superblock/what-have-you...) and do a fair job of rebuilding a virtual filesystem which you access through GetDataBack in order to copy stuff off.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

who the heck else makes drives any more, and do any of them have 2.5" drives rated for 24-hour use in hot environments?

http://www.adtron.com/products/I25fb-IDEFlashDisk.html

Other than that, who makes ANY drives for use in hot environments? Drives are mechanical devices. Friction. Heat. Failure. When you monitored your running drives in the past, were they running around 30c, or more like 50-60c? I'd figure that out before sticking a 7200RPM server drive in a closed, hot environment like a laptop -- those drives are likely expected to operate in blade servers with well-designed tornadoes of active cooling. Those drives might not only cook themselves in a laptop, but other parts of the laptop along with them.

If you really need a laptop to act as a server, you might think about setting up an external 3.5" SATA drive array in an actively ventilated cage and hook it in to the laptop with USB/Firewire/PCCard SATA. Use a basic on-board drive for booting and light personal uses. Distribute server style loads to the external drives.