another hard drive failure story

[Seth Gordon]

I also had a hard drive failure recently, although not quite so 
catastrophic, which has left me with my own mysteries.

The drive is a Western Digital 360GB(?) that came with the Dell Inspiron 
531S that we bought a few years back.  It failed while I was out of town 
for a week--ironically, I had started a backup to run over that week, 
trying to stuff 20GB of music files up an 128Kbps pipe.

I came back with errors like this:

SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake Dispr LinkSeq TrStaTrns }

and lots more besides, but I didn't copy them all down.

If I booted from a LiveCD and then mounted the drive, I could at least 
read the file system (well, I could read it the first time I tried), so 
at least I could rescue the files that I really really didn't want to 
lose.  But then after fooling around with my new internal hard drive 
that if I swapped the *SATA cables* between the old and new drives, the 
LiveCD could read the old drive much more reliably, but the new one spit 
out the same errors.

Fine, so I got myself a new SATA cable.  Did I now have two working 
internal hard drives?

Nooo!  If I plugged the new drive into the motherboard's ATA0 socket and 
the old one into ATA2 (ATA1 being the DVD-ROM drive), then it would boot 
from the new drive and the old drive was completely invisible to the 
system; it didn't show up in the dmesg output or even the BIOS screen. 
If I plugged the old drive into ATA0 and the new drive into ATA2, then 
the new drive was invisible to the BIOS, and the old drive... booted far 
enough to say "I can't mount the root partition, here's a busybox 
prompt, good luck."

I don't want to spend any more money on this problem, but it would be 
nice if there was some way I could boot from the new drive and at least 
mount the old drive read-only for long enough to image it.  Especially 
since the old drive has our Windows partition, and once in a blue moon 
we actually have a reason to boot into Windows.

Failing that... does anyone need a lightly used SATA cable?