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  • From: "David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:21:08 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

> I am having problems even trying to boot linux, without cfdisk.
>
> At first I got various error messages during boot about hda not
> having an IRQ and hdb being non-IDE, kept rebooting, sometimes with
> ignore=hda (which would not let me boot past the messages: hda:
> status error
> hda: drive not ready for command). One time I was able to type
> cfdisk -z /dev/hda and was told the above again. Sometimes I also
> got DriveReady DeviceFault SeekCOmplete DataRequest CorrectedError
> Index, and somethinga about reset.

I didn't know that. This definitely looks like dying hardware. How well
does DOS (any version) handle the drive? Does the DOS fdisk even detect
the drive?

> Perhaps the controller has gone bad? I could try a 40MB drive in
> here as a test, or put these drives in another computer.

At that disk capacity I doubt a controller replacement is much better
than a whole HDD replacement.

> >> Do I recycle this drive now? Or try a low-level format?
> >
> > It's already low-level formatted, if dd didn't produce any error
> > messages. No need to recycle it just yet.

I take that back. :S

> >> Theoretical question:
> >>
> >> Is there a way to just overwrite the partition table, which Running
> >> Linux says is in the first 1024 bytes? They explain that
> >> dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/stuff bs=1k count=1
> >> saves the first 1024 bytes of data to a file.
> >
> > Yeah, if=/dev/zero and of=/dev/hda should overwrite it if that is true.
>
> This appears to have overwritten 1.2G, not just the 512bytes
> containing MBR and partition table.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

erases the whole drive.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1k count=1

erases just the first 1k. bs=blocksize, count=number of blocks. Modify
to suit your needs.

David
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