About that hard drive...

[alexpgp]

I took the boot drive out of my home server and hooked it up to one of those universal doohickeys that provide data and power connections to a USB interface, effectively turning such a disk into an external USB drive.

After going hmmmmmm—BURP! about a dozen times, Windows quietly gave up trying to do anything further with the drive.

I then plugged the getup into a Linux box, with much the same results, except that in Linux, one can type

fdisk -l

at the command line and get some insight into the problem, which in my case was summarized by the line

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't have a valid partition table

This sort of made sense, considering the cavalier manner in which Windows had dealt with the drive. That said, the news did not make me a happy computer camper.

Searching for a solution to my problem on the Internet turned up quite a number of cases where 1-TB drives from Western Digital go belly up like this (or perhaps that's just my perception).

In any event, I plugged the drive back into the Windows box to confirm it doesn't show up in Disk Management (a couple of sites suggested solutions if the drive did show up as present but unformatted), so now I'm 980,000 sectors into a 4,294,967,294-sector scan of the drive using a tool called GetDataBack from Runtime Software.

Just how long this is going to take is not clear. When the scan started, the time was around 21 hours. Right now, it's about 18 hours. As I understand it, the boot drive on a WHS system has two partitions by default: one for the system and the other for data. I am interested in the latter, and as there is nothing else to do until the software has completed its analysis, I shall remain optimistic.

Only 99.9967% of the disk left to scan!

Cheers...

UPDATE: Getting at the data on the drive is not a critical issue. Upgrading my netbook's hard drive this weekend is. Throw in the fact that I started the scan with everything plugged into an unprotected power strip (i.e., one not plugged into a UPS) and that we've had momentary blips in power due to recent thunderstorms, and it's clear I should do the scan later.

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Have you ever investigated Dropbox or other similar service that keeps data held in a particular folder updated on the web? I use it for club data, but don't do it the way they recommend - I copy data I want backed up to that folder but don't do work in it. One advantage is that you can access the web folder from other machines and it also keeps older data versions if you flub something. I use it as one of several backups.