Thank you all so much for your helpful suggestions and observations :)
I found the comment on the pattern exhibited by the corruption in the ID string fascinating :)
I actually think it was the IDE cable... it was pretty badly twisted in there and looked like it was stretched over the corner of the video card! (in fact there was some definite stretching/denting in it at that point.. that may well have been sufficient to knock out one of the channels!)
*unfortunately* I still don't know if that was it, because after changing the cable over for a new one and making sure it was nicely placed with plenty of room and as little twisting (by which I mean rotations, - it wasn't actually twisted like cat5 is twisted ;) - I sat back, looked at it - decided it was good (hehe) and plugged the power cable back into the computer.
*bang* *flash* *electrical burning smell*...
I assume it was the power supply, and I am hoping it didn't take anything else with it (but lets face it everything was connected to it).
So then, not to be defeated, I unplugged the drive, put it in an external USB case, plugged it into my iBook, downloaded an ext2 plugin/control panel type thing for osX, and spent a joyous 3-4 hours waiting for it to finish FSCKing the drive (which was done in the BACKGROUND - so I could only follow it using ps ax | grep fsck ) - to my horror it was using fsck -y !! (and it does this automatically and transparently so there's no option for the user to do it manually) - but FINALLY it finished... I went into my new control panel add-on, clicked 'mount' and bingo there it was... perfect. So that was all instructive in itself. luckily I had glanced at the readme and noticed a reference to the fact that it automatically fsck's a drive before it can mount it.. and given my extremely clever decision (about a couple of weeks ago) to format this 160Gb drive with a non-journalling filesystem it was also an incredibly protracted experience.
On the upside by the time it was almost finished (not that I was to know) I was starting to think that I didn't care if it *had* died so long as the fsck would just END!!! hehehe
So yeah - it all seems fine...
is there a way to modidfy an ext2 partition to add journalling??? or is that process just called mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdd1 :o/
cheers everyone :)
James
On 24/09/2004, at 10:36 AM, John Clarke wrote:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 08:31:28 +1000, James Ponza wrote:
1. The BIOS reports the HDD name as: "GDC GD!6 0JB-0 DEA#" wheras it SHOULD be
something like "WDC WD1600JB-00xxxx". (it is a WD 160Gb drive).
There's a pattern to those errors -- a single bit in each 16-bit half
word is always zero, but it should be a one in some of them. That could
be caused by one or more of:
1. Cable fault. Try a different cable.
2. Fault in the other drive on same cable. Try disconnecting the other
drive.
3 IDE controller fault. Try connecting the drive to the other
channel.
4. Drive fault. If you can get hold of another drive of the same
type, you might be able to swap the controller boards and get some
data off the dead one. No guarantee though; the data may have
already been corrupted. If you try it, make sure the data on the
other drive is backed up before you swap the controller board, just
in case you damage it.
You don't need to boot an O/S to test any of these. If you can get the BIOS to report the correct drive identity, it's OK.
incorrectly (and incidentally this is /dev/hdd - it has one partition - using
the ext2 filesystem, it is connected as the secondary slave, to the SAME
CHANNEL as my DVD-RW (is this a problem?). I have not yet tested the
Not usually, unless they're both configured as slaves.
or have I had something hideously bad happen, ie the drive is dying / has
died?
It might be.
Cheers,
John -- If a bean counter complains about 9G root drives with only 600M used introduce it to the underfloor void. Don't worry, the shouting stops after a while. -- Geoff Lane -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
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