"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
According to Folkert Rienstra :
Please, do not use Reply-To addresses in attribution lines. Get a decent newsclient, or change your attribution line, like everyone
else.
"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
According to mm :
My drive is clicking, and one important partition has a very bad
directory structure. I'm not sure I can copy over even the good
partitions before it "fails". If I open it, what would I want to do
to stop the clicking, or to keep the clicking syndrome from preventing
me from copying the data to a good drive.
The best way to ensure that you can copy over the good partitions
is to _not_ open the drive first.
The safest way is to image copy the whole drive to a new drive. Put
the old drive in a safe place, and try to repair the new drive's
directory structure. Preferably doing a backup of the image you copied
to the new drive before you diddle it, so you can start over _without_
touching the old drive.
The clicking is most likely retries
(ie: gouged media, weak magnetics).
Just any unrecoverable read error (which isn't necessarily a physical one,
it can just be a bad write, ie a logical error).
You _can't_ fix that.
Yes you _can_, for the logical bad blocks.
Not by opening the drive... About the only thing that someone that
doesn't have major equipment can accomplish by opening it up is to
replace the drive electronics. Some of our support people are quite
good at resurrecting drives by swapping the electronics (they keep
electronics sets from head-crashed drives).
But the OPs problem is not the electronics.
Who says.
Perhaps most of these types of failures (drive clicking - retries)
can be "fixed" by causing the drive to write on the bad blocks, and
then doing a fixdisk or equivalent. I'm familiar with somewhat
older gear under UNIX, where you take the sector number from the error
messages and use "dd" or write a small program to write a single
block over the bad sector. Then run the file system repair utilities
(ie: fsck) to clear/reclaim it.
These days with smarter controllers, they sometimes automatically
self-repair (spare out the bad sector),
Only if the sector is readable with retries.
Unrecoverable read error bad sectors are only reallocated on writes.
or a simple low-level reformat of the drive will fix or spare it out.
You might find a suitable procedure on the manufacturer's web site.