Dead hardware

[CP]

I'd been leaving my PC switch on over night for 18 and a half days, in that time, I hadn't even had to kill X once. Then on monday morning I got up to a shocking site. The computer had frozen, required a hard reboot. However it failed to post. So there I was, wondering why my PC wont post, how I'm going to get the 40% assignment off the hard drive before its due in in 5 hours and what else is dead. After taking it round to a friends house, it seems that the HD is completely corrupted, and the mobo is dead.
Whats really odd is that windows detects the drive fine, and the drive will begin to boot, however it can't find the root filesystem. And in linux I can't even fdisk the thing, which worries me slightly.
At least the motherboard was under warranty, so in 2 days time I'll have a nice new motherboard, and then I have to hope that the HD is fine as well.
CP

[trickster]

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=files...x=8&Go.y=7

[edit:gorn]fixed url[/edit]

[countach44]

What filesystem was this?

[Schotty]

[quote author=Corrupt Countach44 link=board=14;threadid=9330;start=0#msg84509 date=1087009513]
What filesystem was this?
[/quote]

Does it really matter if the drive is actually bad?

One thing you can try, is that generally when a drive fails, it falls into one of two main categories

1) Platters are losing the ability to hold a charge,
2) The electronic circuits are failing.

Fixing 1 is a beeotch to fix on your own, and is generally better to send to a data recovery lab.

Fixing 2 is simple. Get a second drive that is EXACTLY the same. I am talking the model number and if possible within the same revision. Exchange the boards.

You can also have stuck arms or flaky heads, but that is from more of abuse/stress than anything, rather than pure chance.

[GhostDawg]

[quote author=Evilest_CP link=board=14;threadid=9330;start=0#msg84500 date=1086939619]
Whats really odd is that windows detects the drive fine, and the drive will begin to boot, however it can't find the root filesystem. And in linux I can't even fdisk the thing, which worries me slightly.
CP
[/quote]
Well I don't know if you have or haven't tried Knoppix, at least to try and get some of your data files, but here is an article on doing it.

System recovery with Knoppix
http://tinyurl.com/2vxqw

Let us know how it worked out if you try it.

[boblucci]

did you try to add it as a slave to someone elses computer just to grab the data off of it?

[CP]

Haha I'm back in action
Turns out, the motherboard was completely dead, and my friends linux install isn't set up right. So I got my motherboard back, plugged in my HD, and then it all booted up fine. This was until my memory decided to play games, and truly corrupt the hard drive. I'm not too bothered though. I did a reinstall of Slack 9.1 and its running. Its running very very badly, but its running.
I think that my memory is on the brink, so I may not be back in action for long, I just can't afford new memory at the moment. Once exams are over, then I'll pull the bastard apart, might even upgrade to a P4, who knows.