[HLUG] HD problem

[Andrew Hodgson]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 10:11:34 +0100, you wrote:

>thanks Andrew for the several ideas below. In the first place the
>warning was given during the boot process and said:
>SMART failure predicted on Primary Master:
>Warning:Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive.
>A failure may be imminent.

Ok.  Did it let you in after this - so you could backup your files to
CD or USB disk?
>
>I guess I could have booted in recovery mode and saved all of my home
>folder contents to disk. I've never done a save to disk because I had no
>disk writer before now, so I decided to install a new disk with a new
>system, Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn.
>
>Now I can't find access to the second, suspect disc which shows up as
>second master in the BIOS although I set the jumper to slave position.
>In /var/log/messages I don't see the disk, presumably because it's not
>part of the booted system. Here's an extract from that file:

[...]

The second drive doesn't show up.  I am wondering whether you can try
the following:

1.  Replace the CD with the suspect HDD in the system.
2.  Swap the drives and see if you can see the second drive in dmesg
or /var/log/messages.  If you can't, and you can see your data, I
would be tempted to see if you could copy to CD (if you have a burner
installed) or to a USB drive or somesuch.

Thanks.
Andrew.