Re: linux hard drive failed, clicking on bootup

AZ Nomad wrote:

I guess if I were in that situation
I would go to the disk-drive manufacturer's web-site,
and see if there was anything helpful there.

Has that ever worked for you?

Yes.
Other things that have worked:
Turning the drive upside-down;
Giving the drive a little knock;
Putting the drive in another machine;
Putting the drive in a freezer.

None of these have cured a drive,
but they have allowed it to run long enough to get a backup.

The reason I suggested reading the manufacturer's advice
is that from the OP's history it did not seem like
a straightforward drive failure.


If the drive goes click-click-click then it has a blown servo.

I've always assumed it meant the drive was trying to read
past the end of the disk, for some reason.

There are
pretty much just three options:
1) admit you fucked up and understand that whatever you had is no more.
2) buy an identical drive and replace the logic board
3) pay somebody twenty grand to try and recover the data. Maybe in a
clean
room something can be repaired. Most likely all you'll do is pad their
bank account and return to option 1.

While what you say is almost certainly true,
it is not absolutely certain.
I have certainly recovered data from disks that seemed to have died.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
.