joe.pelayo
2007-09-01, 06:19 PM CDT
Hello everybody.
A friend of mine recently dropped from a table her external HD (Transcend rack + laptop IDE HD) resulting in the drive not working well any longer. Somebody helped her to retrieve her valuable data through MSDOS (that is what she told me), and yesterday I offered my help to try to make it work again.
Apparently the drive suffered from a kid of 'amnesia' because it could no longer be mounted but I thought there was still hope because it was recognized. Since there was nothing to loose I took it home, opened it (the rack) and for starters made sure the rack was not the problem using a spare laptop HD (recently I've come to have spare laptop HDs :D ). After that I installed the fallen HD in to my laptop and successfully installed Debian Etch. As I suspected rebuilding its partition table brought it again to useful life but the question is: how reliable is it?
While having Debian Etch running I managed to fill the drive up to its capacity without issues, and after that I put it back in the rack, made two partitions (NTFS and Reiser), and filled them with data (I am in the middle of that process right now). While writing to the NTFS partition I heard suspicious noises but the process did not quit.
Is there any fast & reliable method to determine where are its defective sectors?
How precise is Gparted's layout? Can I trust a partition at the right side really is in the edge of the disk?
Thanks.
Joe.
A friend of mine recently dropped from a table her external HD (Transcend rack + laptop IDE HD) resulting in the drive not working well any longer. Somebody helped her to retrieve her valuable data through MSDOS (that is what she told me), and yesterday I offered my help to try to make it work again.
Apparently the drive suffered from a kid of 'amnesia' because it could no longer be mounted but I thought there was still hope because it was recognized. Since there was nothing to loose I took it home, opened it (the rack) and for starters made sure the rack was not the problem using a spare laptop HD (recently I've come to have spare laptop HDs :D ). After that I installed the fallen HD in to my laptop and successfully installed Debian Etch. As I suspected rebuilding its partition table brought it again to useful life but the question is: how reliable is it?
While having Debian Etch running I managed to fill the drive up to its capacity without issues, and after that I put it back in the rack, made two partitions (NTFS and Reiser), and filled them with data (I am in the middle of that process right now). While writing to the NTFS partition I heard suspicious noises but the process did not quit.
Is there any fast & reliable method to determine where are its defective sectors?
How precise is Gparted's layout? Can I trust a partition at the right side really is in the edge of the disk?
Thanks.
Joe.