Hard Drive Recovery Service?

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

On 9/7/07, Matthew Gillen <me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On the contrary, I admire your bravery!

Thanks -- but sometimes the brave get burned :-)

> Were they different OSes?  I once had a box with two harddrives, and one was
> appearently flakey; while they were both plugged in, both Solaris (x86) and
> Windows2000 would hang on boot (both in a similar "Detecting devices" stage).
>  If I unplugged the flakey one, both those OSes would work.  Interestingly,
> Linux neither hung on boot when the strange drive was plugged in, nor had any
> problems using it once booted.

The problem exists at the BIOS level -- not the OS level.  It appears
that the BIOS is trying to auto-detect the disk info (model number,
heads, cylinders, etc), and this task fails, so it hangs.  Maybe I
sent an abnormally high jolt (large voltage) through the actuator and
it really made a weird magnetic pulse on the platter??  Destroying all
the drive info?  Where is that data stored???  On the platters or on
the electronics?

> Of course, the most tolerant OS in my situation was linux, which I'm sure
> you've already tried.  You might give a live-cd based BSD-derived distro a
> shot since it's IDE drivers are likely to have different quirks.

I got OpenBSD too to try, and I have a laptop->IDE converter -- could
give it a shot...

> Kind of clutching at straws, but it's free ;-)  (except for your time of course).

Hah!  A valuable learning experience is rarely monetarily valuable :-P
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen

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