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#1 2010-07-03 08:08:09

mjohnson
Member
Registered: 2009-08-14
Posts: 22

Drive not recognized, but checks out with SMART

I'm trying to pull data off of a disk I originally had in a laptop, before the laptop died.  I have all of the important data backed up elsewhere, but there are a few other things on the drive that would be nice to have.  However, after attaching it to my new (desktop) computer running Arch, I get messages like the following in dmesg, repeated over and over:

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0xb [current] [descriptor]
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 00 01 10 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 272
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0xb [current] [descriptor]
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 00 01 10 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 272
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0xb [current] [descriptor]
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 08 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 768

From what I've been able to find, this is most often a hardware problem.  However, both the short and extended SMART tests (run using smartctl) report that the drive is fine.  smartctl seems to be pretty much the only tool that can do anything with the drive, however: nothing else works (fdisk, mount, etc.) and of course no partitions are showing up in /dev.

I should mention that as the laptop was dying, the hard drive controller was apparently going bad (or something), because it would randomly lose contact with the drive, briefly be read-only, and then lock up entirely.  Often slight pressure on the bottom of the case would restore contact, or alternatively cause the problem to happen.  In other words, this drive has good reason to be messed up. smile  (There was definitely a problem with the drive controller, though, because swapping in a different [known good] hard drive resulted in the same behavior.)

Any ideas on what to try next?  Is there some sort of config setting I can tweak, or is it possible that there's a hardware problem that's not getting picked up by SMART?

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#2 2010-07-03 09:10:00

graysky
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From: :wq
Registered: 2008-12-01
Posts: 10,592
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Re: Drive not recognized, but checks out with SMART

Doesn't sound good.  It could be that there is some hardware on the HDD that SMART doesn't monitor for damage as you mentioned.  I have never experience this before.  Does your BIOS see the HDD?

Last edited by graysky (2010-07-03 09:10:35)


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#3 2010-07-03 09:22:37

mjohnson
Member
Registered: 2009-08-14
Posts: 22

Re: Drive not recognized, but checks out with SMART

Yes, the drive shows up in the BIOS, and it's recognized at some level by the OS: e.g., it shows up as /dev/sda, but there should also be /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 (and those aren't showing up).

I'm trying to get Western Digital's bootable drive diagnostics software to work, but for some reason it complains that it can't find the license file (which is on the CD exactly where it's saying), and won't run.  If I can get it to run I'll give that a go too.

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