Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB Disk failure - Buffer I/O error on device sda2, logical block 1289 lost page write due to I/O error on sda2

["Fatih Tümen" <fthtmn+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 10 October 2010 04:58:04 Fatih Tümen wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 12:15 AM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Will fdisk read and recognize the partition table on the USB disk? If
>> > fdisk results in disk read errors then I'd begin to think more about
>> > 'hardware' :(
>>
>> No "Unable to read /dev/sda" is what fdisk says. I never had a disk
>> (hardware) failure before. Is there no way to extract data from it?
>
> The noise you're describing is indicative of mechanical failure.
>

That I was fearing but I cant understand how it can fail all of a
sudden. I did not drop it or something. Just ran eix and boom. Would
you call it a coincidence of running eix with the best before date of
the disk?

> Unless your PC can access the drive (dmesg will show what the kernel sees)
> then there is no easy way of getting the data out of it.
>
> I have heard of people opening the USB enclosure of external drives and
> removing the drive, which they then installed in a laptop.  However, these
> were cases where the USB controller was faulty, rather than the moving
> elements of the drive itself.
>

I tried that to a friend laptop's dead drive. It Didt work. I am
afraid im in a similar situation here.

> If you had access to a forensics lab you could even take the platters out of
> the drive itself and read them on platter reader.  On the other hand, if you
> only had ccache, distfiles and packages a resync with a new external drive
> will get you a working system again.
>

I actually thought about that too. There is a forensic lab quite close
to me but I doubt that they would bother with this or whether it would
worth the effort.

> Before you head for the shops you would at least want to try another USB cable
> as Walter suggested, just in case.

I found the cable and tried. Same!
Anyway thanks for the suggestion.