Partially dead drive

[Paul King]

Hugh:

|| I have a 1TB Seagate drive which, I admit, was partitioned when the NT 
|| drive was less than half full, and I didn't defrag the data to the 
|| start of the drive.

| Why do you have to "admit" that?  Are there any consequences?

I felt I needed to mention that because I may have set a partition boundary
during resizing in a way that closed off a file or cut it off. I could be
wrong.

While I normally back up my data, and my most critical data for work is
available in several copies on lots of storage media, my personal stuff --
email, stuff downloaded from Emusic or Itunes, hadn't been treated as nicely
as that. I am sure prospects for recovery are dim, but I'll give it a try
before tossing it.

FWIW, EMusic no longer allowed me to re-download all of my purchased music
(they used to). They have now resorted to handing me a courtesy credit of
$60, which does not account for even a fourth of the purchases I made. I
haggled it to $80. I am less worried about ITunes, for which I mostly
downloaded free audio and video from ITunesU. I would also like to recover
what email I can.

| <Superstitious mode> When I've used Linux tools to resize a Windows 
| boot partition, I've found it important to immediately boot Windows 
| and do a repair.  This is before installing Linux.  I think that 
| the resizing might be moving unmoveable files and the Windows 
| repair tools can fix that. </superstitious mode>

The hard drive in question was for data. It wasn't a system drive.
<snip>

|| It lasted a couple of months that way, then it all but bricked my 
|| computer. While the NT (W7) system partition was on a separate drive, 
|| GRUB was the MBR of the bad drive. The partitioning on the bad drive 
|| was done to install Linux. The NT partition on the bad drive was used 
|| for various data (no programs or system files) which I wanted to at 
|| least make a valiant attempt at trying to recover.

| So: you are saying that the problem is raw disk I/O errors.  
| Nothing to do with partitioning.  But symptoms and recovery methods 
| involve partitions and file systems.  Right?

I am only telling you what errors I saw. I wasn't attempting to make 
interpretations. But yes, most partitions lived, and mounting NTFS 
gives me I/O errors.

| Disks often go bad in a number of spots.  Often, an increasing number 
| of spots.  The bullet holes in a filesystem don't always hit vital 
| organs.

| If you care, the very FIRST thing you should do when you have trouble 
| like this, and you care at all about your data, is capture an image 
| of the disk (or perhaps images of partitions) onto somewhere safe.

The errors happened suddenly. It was simply that, one day, I could not
reboot the machine. And this was because Grub was on the failed drive.

<snip - but all good reasons for doing backups>

But since I suspected that reducing a partition size and creating new
partitions was going to "do something" unstable, I probably should have 
made a backup before doing that.

Thanks for your valuable advice, Hugh. This can prove helpful, although 
things are looking pretty dim at this point.

Paul King

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