--- On Sat, 6/9/12, P. J. Alling <[email protected]> wrote:
From: P. J. Alling <[email protected]> Subject: Re: OT computer problems. To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, June 9, 2012, 8:45 PM I don't think it's actually spinning up but the electronics are good enough for the bios to think there's a drive installed. I'll give it a try though nothing to lose really. Paul Sorenson wrote: > Does the drive spin up? If it does, you could try a kit to go from the drive > to USB to see if it still can read data. If so, you should be able to > recover what seems to be lost. Cost for the adapter kit is about 30 bucks. > > You could also try booting with Knoppix from a live CD to see if your data on > the drive is recoverable. Of course, you'd have to reinstall the "dead" > drive again to use Knoppix for data recovery. > > Both of those tools have saved my butt a couple times. > > http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html > > -p > > On 6/9/2012 10:12 AM, P. J. Alling wrote: >> So this morning the laptop won't boot. Narrowed the problem down to the >> hard drive, mainly by removing the upgrade and putting the old tiny hard >> drive back. Now everything I've not backed up in the last 6 months is >> gone. Ok nothing much important except the PDML and a bunch of Firefox >> bookmarks, but still a PITA. At least the WesternDigital RMA process was >> relatively painless. Now to just hear from them about a shipping >> question, I wonder how long that will take. >> > I'm a bit curious about what led the drive not to spin up. FYI, there is a feature called "Power-up in standby" that prevents the disk to spin up on boot. Perhaps, an upgrade or program misuses led to trigger the wrong command unfortunately. If the hdd is stuck in stand-by, then this could mean that neither the laptop motherboard nor the OS trigger the "wakeup" command on boot. AFAIK, only recent hardware and OS support this feature while most hdd have supported it for a longer time (mostly a server feature). You could try to reconfigure the disk not to use the "Power-up in standby" feature. Note that, it is hard to find USB controllers that forward low level hard disk drive command. Typically, S.M.A.R.T. and "Power-up in standby" features are rarely available with 30 bucks usb to hdd controllers. Better try using a zalman zm ve200/ve300 enclosure or perhaps usb 3 enclosures for that (but with a few more bucks), or even better plug your hdd to a free ide/sata port (the best solution to me). just some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-up_in_standby http://reboot.pro/16267/ http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
