On Mon, 18 Oct 2010 02:10:44 +0200
"Benny LC6fgren" <bl-li...@lofgren.biz> wrote:
> On 2010-10-17 12.57, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> > Summary
> > -------
> > My primary laptop ("nitrogen") died, so I moved its disk to a backup
> > laptop ("oxygen"). That laptop then died. :( I have now moved the
> > former-nitrogen-disk to an external enclosure so that I can access my
> > files via USB from still another laptop ("silver").
>
> [snip]
>
> > What's suspicious is that I get this identical message (including the
> > exact same sector numbers) for *any* partition. While I could certainly
> > imagine that whatever broke nitrogen and oxygen managed to corrupt the
> > disk contents, it seems implausible that it would garble the exact same
> > list of sectors on each of several different FFS partitions.
>
> As Otto mentioned, the sectors referenced are relative to the partition
> offset, so they would probably be the same (for equally formatted
> partitions) if few sectors are readable on the disk as a whole.
>
> > Further details
> > ---------------
> > * oxygen and nitrogen are both Thinkpad T42 laptops, and were running
> > 4.6-stable/i386; dmesg below
> > * silver is an HP Pavillion dv4, freshly installed with 4.7-release/i386
> > from the CD set
> > * I know silver's USB system& the USB cable are ok, because I just used
> > them (including the same USB cable) to recover a week-old backup copy
> > of my home directory from an (another) external USB disk
> > * the former-nitrogen-disk is a Hitachi HTS541616J9AT00 160GB 2.5" PATA
> > disk. The external enclosure is labelled "Rocketfish RF-PHD25 2.5"
> > Enclosure kit for hard drives"; it (and the disk within) is powered
> > via the USB connection.
>
> Something I've noticed with several external USB enclosures is that they
> may require more power than the USB ports are able to deliver. If you
> have marginal power, the hard drive will most probably be less than
> cooperative with the host, in more or less subtle ways. (Such that one
> USB enclosure/disk may work and another fail on the same hardware, for
> example.)
>
> I suggest that you, if you haven't already, try to add external power to
> the USB enclosure (most 2 1/2" enclosures have an input for +5V), or try
> using a USB Y-cable that draws power from two USB connectors on the host.
>
> Another quirk that some laptops have is that max usable current can be
> different on different USB ports, so one quick thing to try is to test
> the other ports on the laptop as well.
>
The ports on the back of pcs supply more current than the front
ports too and so does usb2 than usb1.
