Hello, I have an important hard drive that may or may not be working, and two computers which I can't get to boot. I need to get this all resolved as it's affecting my ability to work. I'm happy to consider paid assistance at this point.
The short version: I've got a drive that has my home directory plus a bunch of other data which I currently can't access because I can't get either of the two computers I've tried to put it in to see it, or even boot at this stage. My most urgent need is to get data which will allow me to write my invoices. Being blind and not able to see things like the BIOS screen is proving very frustrating right now, though I'm pretty sure that one of the boxes is now showing nothing on the screen when I try to boot it. I don't know whether this drive is having problems or if the problems lie with the computers. Long version: I have 3 drives and two computers here att issue. I'll give all these items labels in order to make it easier to understand. Drive A is a 2 GB (yes) Western Digital from 1998 that was up until 2 weeks ago my root device. Drive B is an 80 GB Western Digital that's about 3 or 4 years old and contains most of my data. Drive C is a 120 GB Western Digital drive which used to have a Windows XP installation and which I'm now attempting to use as my new root disk. Computer 1 is my former workstation, a 450 mHz machine with something like 256 MB RAM. Computer 2 is a machine that used to run Windows XP, and is a P4 3.0 gHz box with 1 GB RAM. Up until Monday two weeks ago, I was happil using computer 1 with drives A and B as my workstation. I use Debian in text-only mode so this machine was perfectly capable of fulfilling my needs. On Monday the 23rd, we had a scheduled power outage for maintenance, which left us without power for something like 5 hours. When power was restored, computer 1 would no longer boot. I had thought at the time that this might be because the BIOS battery was dead, though I also knew that Drive A was scheduled to give out at some point given its age. The computer place I took the machine to wasn't very helpful in saying what they did to get it to boot, but they did say that the battery had not been the problem (though they did replace it anyway). When I got it back, I found the computer trying to boot from drive A and not succeeding very well due to read errors (it couldn't cleanly load in applications, etc), and unable to see drive B at all. I decided that now would be a good time for an upgrade, so I decided to take Drive C out of a former Windows box (computer 2) which we'd retired last year due to its tendancy to have trouble booting, something I really should probably have investigated thoroughly at the time. After a bit of fun and games, I managed to get the Debian Lenny NetInst CD to boot and see Drive C and install the system. However, it still did not see Drive B. Having done this, however, I was then unable to boot the installed system from drive C, and I found out through some sighted assistance that the BIOS would not detect either drive, even though the Debian installer could see drive C. Deciding that this might be a case of the BIOS not being able to cope with such large drives, I put the two drives into computer 2 which was where drive C had originally come from. This computer also contains an 80 GB SATA drive which it would be nice to use at some point, but it's not important right now. I was able to boot Computer 2 a number of times, and it successfully ran the Debian installation on Drive C. It still would not detect drive B however, which is what \I really need to access in the short term. I thought perhaps that some BIOS settings might mean that the computer was not able to see drive B, so I tried putting it onto the controller where the optical drives were being detected (remember I'm not able to see the BIOS screen so can't just go in and try to find it there). At this point, the machine stopped booting, and no amount of moving things around or reverting to previously known good configurations seems to make it want to boot. As mentioned above, it looks to my poor eyesight that the screen is blank now. This may be a reoccurance of the previous booting problems this computer used to have, or it may be that I've messed something up in there. Drive A is formatted with EXT2. Drive B is either EXT2 or EXT3, can't remember. Drive C is EXT3 now. My goals in order are: 1. Determine if Drive B is functional or not. If it is functional, get off it data I need for everyday work, if not then have the data on it recovered somehow and transferred to another drive. 2. Copy data off drive A. This is less important as it's mostly operating system stuff, and I admit that I might not get completely clean reads, but it would be nice to have as there is some old Email there I'd like to keep if possible. 3. Determine the status of computer 2. Try to figure out what component is weak and decide whether that component should be replaced or if it would be better to buy an upgrade PC and canibalise computer 2 for parts. Computer 1 is sufficiently old that I doubt that its parts will be of much use, except for a couple of cards that I plan to use. 4. If computer 2 can be salvaged, there are a couple of things I'd like to do such as getting the PC speaker to work and, if the IDE drive can also be salvaged, seeing if we can get both IDE drives and the SATA drive to operate at once. In doing this, I would like to be able to reuse any hardware that it makes sense to retain. I am not really in a position to be spending money on this, however I realise the need to get back up and working again. I don't want to go throwing away perfectly good hardware however. Determining the faulty component in computer 2 may allow us to go with just a case or just a motherboard/processor etc. This is a matter of some urgency. It is affecting my ability to work and my ability to bill for the work I have done. I am looking for help, free or paid, or recommendations for where I might get such help. I am blind and don't speak much Hebrew. Someone who can come to me in Ra'anana would be ideal, though I'm prepared to take my gear somewhere if that makes more sense. Please feel free to write back with questions or suggestions, or you can call me on 052 853 2827. Thanks in advance, Geoff. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
