If I may add, there's currently a virus around that potentially manage to mess
up the BIOS of any M/B.
So, if your system or server is showing a strange date/day/year, some of your
drives aren't recognized, or your system suddently simply won't boot, this
might be the cause.
The attack appears to be a drive-by attack imbedded in Flash (surprise!), and
coming from a broad variety of web sites. Hence the particular system user
can't be blamed.
Solution: Disconnect all hdd's, and reflash the BIOS, and then set a sensible Supervisor pwd in your BIOS before doing anything else. Sometimes this alone will solve the
problem. Remember to load & save Setup Defaults before proceeding.
This virus is also transparantly transferred (as in "invisibly") by usb, swapped hdd's etc., so be alert about this, and be sure to include this matter into your back up
strategies. Further, this virus also disables the "Disable Active Scripting" facility in at least NAV.
For a clean system: As Tim says, format the boot sector, but also include sector 64 (e.g. use IBM's original zap.com util) - then perform a secure erase of the drive
(goes for every drive in the system).
Sometimes it is enough just to rebuild the drive index file (testdisk) after
reflashing the BIOS. But milage varies due to numerous variants of this
particular virus.
This usually works:
1. format boot sector on drive, including sector 64, with drive mounted as
master on primary controller.
2. repeat step 1 for additional hdds's in the system (mount the drives as
master on a primary controller) as steps
3. use a *nix distro to define partition size on the boot drive (MS doesn't get
partition offsets right)
4. power off, reboot, and install.
5. if you're in doubt about ANY parts of the above, get new drives instead, or turn them over to a specialist like Tim. The data on your drives is most likely
recoverable, and not nessescarily infected itself.
Tim Lider wrote:
Could the HPA be located between LBA 1 and 62? If so just wipe those
sectors clean and should fix the problem. This is the first time I have
seen this problem with clone software changing the size of the drive.
If it is not on the sectors I mentioned. You can change the Max LBA of a
drive. But that takes a firmware utility to change it.
Regards,
Tim Lider
Sr. Data Recovery Specialist
Advanced Data Solutions, LLC
http://www.adv-data.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware-
[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lubomír Cabla
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 11:44 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H] Odd problem with hard drive
There is a solution:
Acronis HPA Makes the Cloned Drive Display Wrong Capacity
http://kb.acronis.com/content/1710
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Thane Sherrington <
[email protected]> wrote:
At 03:03 PM 1/13/2010, Tim Lider wrote:
Is the computer you cloned it from able to access the data on the
computer?
If so, then it could be the dell does not recognize the 160GB hard
drive
correctly. I have seen this many times on Legacy machines that do
not have
LBA32 or higher drive mapping.
This is a fairly recent computer so it should be able to see larger
drives.
And when I move the hard drive back from the Dell to the cloning
system,
the BIOS on the cloning system also states that the drive is 98.5GB.
Western Digital morons told that Acronis had "cloned the size of the
drive
from the source drive" but of course that's a load of crap, and when
I
rebooted after cloning, the drive reported its size normally. So for
some
reason, installing the drive in the Dell overwrites the firmware in
the
drive and sets the size to 98.5GB. I've yet to find a way to flash
the
firmware on the WD drive.
Also, were there any bad sectors on the drive during the clone? If
so, this
is probably why the drive is BSOD'ing.
There were, but Acronis copied without complaint.
T
