[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[Ron Frazier]

Hi Cornelis,

I've had some dealings with bad drives here and there.  All the 
following is simply my opinion, and I'm sure others will have other 
opinions.  I would run Spinrite on it from http://www.grc.com .  The 
program will thoroughly exercise every sector, read it if possible, and 
if not, employ statistical methods to try to recover as much data as 
possible at the sub sector level.  I know it has saved at least one 
drive for me.  This process will often make the drive bootable / 
readable again at least long enough to get data off.  Spinrite will not 
erase data on the drive.  It will statistically analyze and rewrite 
sectors that need recovering, so it does change them.  However, those 
sectors were originally unreadable by other means, so if anything, you 
should be better off.  The program is a commercial product and costs $ 
89.  Since you have a backup, it may not be worth it to you to buy such 
a thing.  IF, and ONLY IF, you don't mind erasing the drive and trying 
to bring it back from the dead, you could use something like Disk 
Utility in Ubuntu Linux to delete the partitions and reinitialize and 
repartition and reformat the drive.  Then, I would use a disk wiping 
utility like some of the ones on The Ultimate Boot CD ( 
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ).  If you do this, be careful, you could 
erase your main system drive.  Wipe the drive in question several times 
with random data.  This is not for security.  It is to force every 
sector on the drive to be written and rewritten several times (something 
which Spinrite does).  This forces the drive's firmware to analyze every 
sector carefully to determine that it is fully and reliably writable and 
readable, and to map out any that are bad.  If you do several wipes 
without errors, then repartition and reformat it again.  If all this 
passes, run a long SMART disk diagnostic with something like Disk 
Utility.  Finally, if all that has passed, and if the drive is not 
showing any bad sectors, I would trust the drive with new data.  If I'm 
using Spinrite to do all this, I wipe the drive once with a 3rd party 
utility just to randomize all the flux patterns and write each sector, 
then I run 6 exhaustive Spinrite passes instead of the other multiple 
wipe processes.  This reads inverts writes and reads inverts writes 
every sector every time I run a pass.  So, every sector, every bit, on 
the drive is tested multiple times with both binary 1's and 0's.  So, 
even without Spinrite, if you just want to thoroughly test and 
initialize the drive (which also erases it), you can do it with all free 
software.  What the free programs will not do, as far as I know, is 
recover heretofore unrecoverable sectors the way Spinrite will in many 
cases.  Also, running Spinrite periodically on good drives actually 
prevents errors by refreshing the magnetic fields of every bit on the 
drive, which may fade over time and become unreadable.  (If you decide 
to use Spinrite, contact me and I'll help you through it.)  Of course, 
if the drive is not spinning, has mechanically crashed, or has a bad 
controller board, etc., no software on the planet will fix that.  You 
probably want to run a long SMART test on the refurbished drive 
periodically which I THINK includes a read only surface analysis.  At 
the slightest hint of ABNORMAL mechanical noises or bad sectors from the 
drive, I would decommission it, get the data off, and replace it.

Hope this helps.

Sincerely

Ron

On 1/24/2012 11:30 AM, Cornelis van Dijk wrote:
> Hi all,
> Yesterday the harddrive on my 4 year old HP Pavilion died. No
> warranty, extended or otherwise.
> Everything was backed up so that is no problem. Now what? Is this
> thing self-serviceable? Could a shop do it? Send it to HP for repair?
> Or just replace it?
> It happened while I was installing suse 11.2, probably no connection,
> drive would have died anyway. It will still write but cannot read. All
> diagnostics (XP and Linux) tell me that the drive has unrecoverable
> errors.
> Suppose I would plug in my Seagate external usb drive. Could I put an
> OS on that? Would it boot?
> Thanks a lot in advance for any response.
>
> Cor van Dijk
>
>    

-- 

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Ron Frazier

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