[Nottingham] Computer woes

[Duncan John Fyfe]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Alex Walker wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:49:18AM +0100, Duncan John Fyfe wrote:
> > > > From what little I understand this problem can come about for a
> > > > few of reasons: Either the disk is dying - but you may be able to
> > > > salvage some of your data before t dies. or the DMA controller is
> > > > having trouble.
> > The DMA controller 'having trouble' can be because of the drive
> > (timings slightly wrong).
>
> Ah OK.  Will try it in another computer at some point.
>
> > Some kernel boot parameters to try:
> > 1.	'hdd=slow'     = slow things down a bit.
> > 2.	'hdd=noprobe'  = drive is present but don't autoprobe it.
> > 3.	'ide1=nodma'   = don't automatically use dma on this interface (I think that is right)
>
> OK, the first one made quite a difference... I can now boot!

exellent.
Now try combining 1 & 3.
Then hdparm as per previous post.

> However mounting doesn't work, it comes up with the same errors.
>
> I fiddled with dd and did:
> dd if=/dev/hdd of=test count=10
> to see if I could get anything off it and indeed I could (although it
> seemed to take quite a while)  However if I change hdd to hdd1 or any
> other partition, I get the errors in my syslog and eventually dd says
> reading `/dev/hdd1': Input/output error
> 8+0 records in
> 8+0 records out
>
> Also, if I increase to count to 100 on /dev/hdd, it also dies and says:
> reading `/dev/hdd': Input/output error
> 40+0 records in
> 40+0 records out
>

Not good but don't give up hope yet.

>
> I'm in the glorious neighbourhood of Lenton.  But I'm not sure how much
> help another person could be...

Because they might be able to bung it in a machine that doesn't do udma4/5
or has a different chipset and that might be all it needs to get your data
off.

>but if anyone's willing and knows stuff
> about hard didks, then we could arrange a time to fiddle... after the
> weekend tho - cos I'm away Fri morn -> Sun arvo.
>

I might be able to but I'm away and or busy all of next week.


Have fun,
Duncan

-- 
Duncan John Fyfe          X-ray Astronomy Group,
                          Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,
Phone +44 116 252 3635    University of Leicester,
E-mail djf@star.le.ac.uk  University Road,
                          Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.