Hard drive crashed -- need advice

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Picture of the above for clarity: http://i.imgur.com/CktrJ.png

And I'm not sure. I think one is the recovery, and I think sda3 is the main windows partition or something (most number of blocks/start end/etc)

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

The root account by default is disabled in Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants. The proper command is 'sudo -i'. This goes for anything with sudo installed on it when root is disabled or you just want to avoid logging into root.

Also correct me if I'm wrong but I don't understand how this will help at all. All this will do is destroy his partition table, file-systems, and data. As far as I know it doesn't matter what garbage is on a hardrive, file-systems typically don't give a crap about anything they didn't write themselves.

'sudo -i' it is then Thank you for that. Basically whatever'll get you superuser on your machine.

And if you can somehow repair it, go for it. My instructions are under the assumption that all repair attempts end in failure and your only option is zero the disk and try installing "from scratch".

And Reincarnate, by all means take all of this into consideration/etc... And thank you fido123 for adding helpful information as well.

-edit-

As far as how it will help out, Windows may be choking up because of the data that's there being corrupted, yet still recognizable by Windows so it tries to use it, fails. Vs. if you zero it, Windows will see that as "blank hard disk data" won't be choking up on it. Windows does lots of stupid stuff sometimes (Like WindowsXP failing to install correctly if you have a card reader installed -- so you have to remove the card reader, install WindowsXP, then install the card reader, as one particular example)

Another example of stupid stuff Windows does. Move a file on Windows? .. it makes a new file, copies byte for byte, then marks the old for deletion. Vs. the more sane UNIX/Linux way of just moving a file pointer on disk if you move a file.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

How do I zero that one bad sector?

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

The root account by default is disabled in Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants. The proper command is 'sudo -i'. This goes for anything with sudo installed on it when root is disabled or you just want to avoid logging into root.

Also correct me if I'm wrong but I don't understand how this will help at all. All this will do is destroy his partition table, file-systems, and data. As far as I know it doesn't matter what garbage is on a hardrive, file-systems typically don't give a crap about anything they didn't write themselves.




How was your partitioning scheme? Is one of those a recovery partition, one of them is where you store your OS, and the other is where you cram all your data so it's not lost in reformats? Anyways now that I look at it it doesn't really matter. /dev/sda2 seems to be your boot partition but I have a feeling that's just Windows Boot Loader. Better be safe than sorry and just run the following command:

ntfsfix /dev/sda1 && echo "sda1" && ntfsfix /dev/sda2 && echo "sda2" && ntfsfix /dev/sda3 && echo "SUCCESS"

That whole thing is one command. Will tell you when it's done each one to give you some piece of mind that it's not frozen or w/e. Overall I'd say /dev/sda3 is your most likely candidate.

"Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk."

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Is there any damn way to simply run chkdsk on this effin drive without trying to invoke Windows 7 which doesn't like to load?

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

I'm not sure there is an easy way to do that. If you knew exactly what sector it was, in theory you could also use dd to zero just that individual sector. The problem is how do you find exactly which sector you need to zero?

It still wouldn't fix your Windows problem though (but may allow that bad sector to be remapped successfully, since it'd count as a write operation).

If you knew what sector you'd do something like (after becoming superuser, assuming sda is your drive, and assuming 512 bytes per sector)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=<numberofsectorstoskip> bs=512 count=1

Replace <numberofsectorstoskip> with some actual appropriate number (that's where finding the exact sector number comes in play which I don't know off the top of my head how you'd do that)

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Times I wish I were a Linux nerd

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Tried sudo fsck /dev/sda

"Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running an e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>"

To which I try sudo e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sda and get the exact same message again.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Try running fsck.ntfs or fsck.ntfs-3g (which fido123 had you install) on /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 as appropriate.

Because it's apparently trying to check it as if it's an Ext2 filesystem which it's not -- it's NTFS. But also you're running it with /dev/sda (your hard drive) as the argument when you want /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3 (the partitions, which are NTFS) as the argument.

Hope it helps.

And the e2fsck stuff is for Ext2 and Ext3 (and Ext4) filesystems only. Windows uses FAT, NTFS, exFAT filesystems (but typically is installed in NTFS). Ext2 and company are typically Linux filesystems.

So for example

sudo fsck.ntfs /dev/sda1
sudo fsck.ntfs /dev/sda2
sudo fsck.ntfs /dev/sda3

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Tried using MagicParted or whatever it's called from an Ultimate Boot CD I just burned and attempted to use TestDisk to repair the boot/MFT of the partitions. Looks like it's partition 2 that's being a bitch (the boot partition) -- it throws a tantrum when I try to Repair MFT on that partition.

EDIT: OK, I'll try that out next. Should I do it from the liveCD or the native Wubi installation?

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

From the LiveCD definitely

-edit-
Also Linux isn't 100% compatible with NTFS .. which is why this kind of area is really gray/iffy. It can read it fine but manipulating it isn't exactly 100%. You may be able to get by with just overwriting the Windows 7 boot partition with zeros, then boot off the Windows 7 DVD, and repair the boot partition from there. Make backups first though! because yeah. Might lose stuff if this doesn't work.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

For whatever reason it now won't let me use fsck.ntfs since I am on the liveCD... jesus christ

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

For whatever reason it now won't let me use fsck.ntfs since I am on the liveCD... jesus christ

D'oh. That makes sense because you installed it on the hard drive and it's probably not bundled with the LiveCD. You'll have to reinstall it while using the LiveCD (but once you reboot you lose it again of course).

Again, this probably won't fix it??? Go ahead and back up any important data you can still access NOW. Seriously.

Zero just the boot partition. Try the Windows 7 DVD. Try to repair the installation from there. It just may work. (Then again it may not)

[andy-o24]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Suicide.

-o24

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

The windows 7 CD is useless unless I can fix this thing externally -- it literally doesn't even load the W7 CD into any menus I can use. It just hangs.

There isn't anything massively important on this laptop but I'd prefer to not have to redownload all my shit again