Re: IDE hard drive failure

[paul@mackinney.net]

Paladin declaimed:
> Hi,
> 
> One of my drives (the least important, thank God!) failled recently.
> Since I can't afford taking it to some company that recovers data I
> was thinking of using software to try to recover the best I could.
> I found a very good program named my_rescue that does some of the dd
> work, but if it founds a bad cluster skips it a continues to get the
> rest of the data. It also saves the status of it's work so you can
> try at a latter time to recover that data that you didn't get the
> first time. The problem now is that BIOS doesn't always recognize
> the drive. :/
> And that brings me to the question:
> 
> Do you know of any program that allows access to a drive bypassing
> the BIOS?
> 
> BTW, would you recommend RAID5 using an entire disk and two
> partitions of another? (If it's even possible to do that...)
> 
Putting on my "ten years of experience working for a backup software
company" hat, here's my take:

1. If the BIOS doesn't always recognize the drive, then you have one of
three problems: bad BIOS, bad cable, bad drive. Since the drive has
already failed once, you're pretty sure it's the third reason. Try
swapping/re-seating the cables or reconfiguring the master/slave
relation on your IDE bus. If the problem persists then it's time to
start using that drive for a doorstop, bookend, or other purpose
suitable to its proven reliabilty.

2. No inherent problems with using RAID 5 as you describe, but if the
performance and reliability benefit gained by using a RAID is worth the
extra work setting it up and recovering when things really go wrong,
then it should be worth plunking down a few hundred $ for two brand new
identical high-performance, high reliability drives. Unless you just
want to set up a RAID for the practice, of course.

HTH, Paul
-- 
Paul Mackinney
paul@mackinney.net