On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sunday 10 October 2010 04:58:04 Fatih Tümen wrote: >> On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 12:15 AM, walt <w41...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > Will fdisk read and recognize the partition table on the USB disk? If >> > fdisk results in disk read errors then I'd begin to think more about >> > 'hardware' :( >> >> No "Unable to read /dev/sda" is what fdisk says. I never had a disk >> (hardware) failure before. Is there no way to extract data from it? > > The noise you're describing is indicative of mechanical failure. >
That I was fearing but I cant understand how it can fail all of a sudden. I did not drop it or something. Just ran eix and boom. Would you call it a coincidence of running eix with the best before date of the disk? > Unless your PC can access the drive (dmesg will show what the kernel sees) > then there is no easy way of getting the data out of it. > > I have heard of people opening the USB enclosure of external drives and > removing the drive, which they then installed in a laptop. However, these > were cases where the USB controller was faulty, rather than the moving > elements of the drive itself. > I tried that to a friend laptop's dead drive. It Didt work. I am afraid im in a similar situation here. > If you had access to a forensics lab you could even take the platters out of > the drive itself and read them on platter reader. On the other hand, if you > only had ccache, distfiles and packages a resync with a new external drive > will get you a working system again. > I actually thought about that too. There is a forensic lab quite close to me but I doubt that they would bother with this or whether it would worth the effort. > Before you head for the shops you would at least want to try another USB cable > as Walter suggested, just in case. I found the cable and tried. Same! Anyway thanks for the suggestion.
