corrupt hd? install prob?

Farkenell · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Dec 2003 Posts: 88

Hey everyone

new here...

very eager to get gentoo workin...but always had trouble gettin the booloader workin...

anyway I've been at it for awhile now...always had to start fresh, with a new install, to make sure I didn't miss anything...

anyway to the point...I put in an unused hd I got lying around prob is, a certain part of the hd is kinda jipped...so my partition is like

20gb (unused - just allocated it (the error seems to be within this amount (won't format))
/boot
/swap
/the other one

anyway will this work fine? its a 60gb hd...

bmichaelsen · Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 6:48 pm Post subject:

I have a little homeserver configured like that - so it should work.
But if the part of the hdd storing partitions and the MBR is broken, there is not much you could do - booting from another device (floppy,cdrom) will not help against the broken partition table.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 6:56 pm Post subject:

bmichaelsen,

Get the HDD testing tools of the manufactuers website. If the boot block, which is the very first block of the drive is dead, its 'game over' for that drive, since the partition table is there.

If the drive is growing surface defects that it can't hide by mapping the out to spare sectors, its likely to have a very limited life, since there will be debris in the platter chamber. This debris will get into the bearings, on the head(s) and generally accelerate the rate of decay.

If the problem is 'soft' errors, the manufactuers utilities may be able to recover them. All data will be lost of course.

Regards,

NeddySeagoon
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.