How do you tell if your HD wont work again?

[1veedo]

I got home today, was booted in arch64, and expected the desktop to appear when I moved the mouse. But nothing worked -- the black powersaving thing never went away, pressing buttons, ctrl+alt+F1/7, etc, so I held the power button and started it back up. Nothing booted. No grub. The bootit partition manager (floppy) wont even start the partitioning program. And fdisk, well...

root@0[knoppix]# fdisk /dev/hda

Unable to read /dev/hda

So is it broken? Should I get a new hard drive or is this fixable?

[Klaynos]

Have you fiddled inside your computer recently? (check the cables are pluged in)

Try a live CD to see if it'll mount the disk for reading,

 

Boot into the bios and see if it detects the disk...

[bluesmudge]

Just as Klaynos says . . .with the added . . if something happens to the harddrive and you managed to fix it just get a new one . . . . if its failed one would you want to risk all your data on it? . . . . unless of course the faliure was user induced (loose cable, playing with bios etc)

[1veedo]

Yep, I think it's gone for good. I had a perfect gentoo install and now I've just been checking out liveCDs. I made a small liveCD but I cant do much cause for some reason squashfs nor unionfs wants to work.

 

The amount of time it takes gentoo to install anything makes me want to forget all about it and go back to ubuntu or something.

[encipher]

Just a shot in the dark here, but are you sure your hard drive isnt located at /dev/sda ? Depending on your distribution and kernel setup, if you have SATA drives they could be under /dev/sda and not /dev/hda. Check that. Also try removing it and plugging it into a different position .. secondary master/slave.. and try loading it there. Lastly, I would load a windows isntallation CD to see if it recognizes the hard drive at all.

[1veedo]

It's always been hda -- hda1,hda2,hda3 etc. Now it shows up as a 1MB device called hda (no hda1 or 2). In other words, it thinks that it's a 1MB hard drive and wont do anything with it. sda only pops up when I put somethign in usb.

 

I tried copying /dev/hda with dd but it was just strait zeros from what I could tell (tial hda.img, mount -o loop). The image was also 1MB in size.

 

I guess it just proves that it's not if your hard drive will crash, it's when.