殴===============================================================================================コ Bladerunner's Ramblings on some last ditch efforts to resurrect a trashed drive. This article assumes that you have already tried the usual ways to repair the drive. 殴===============================================================================================コ Hard Drive Despair Repair (Part two of two)... [check out part one of this in the !!!Brand New Docs!!! folder in the Files area. File name: H Drive Despair Repair (1 of 2)]. Ok, We've discussed ways to resurrect a drive that you may have not thought of before. Now we'll talk about how to deal with a drive that you can't get to mount so you CAN repair it... Sometimes a drive gets so damaged that it won't mount on the desktop. This can occur in many ways, but what I'm going to talk about here is the situation that is the most frustrating, scary and confusing. You boot up your computer, and as the disk mounts on the desktop, the whole system freezes. You boot from a floppy or a CD, holding down the Shift key during startup to disable extensions and when the disk mounts, the whole thing freezes again. Ok. Now what? You reboot, this time you zap the PRAM, by holding down Command-Option-P-R keys (a way to remember it is to think of the keys COPR or "copper"), the disk tries to mount, boom, down again. Ok, so you try to rebuild the desktop, holding down Command-Option, and it freezes again. You are starting to get really scared. So you try to boot from an external drive, by holding down Command-Option-Shift-Delete at startup. It goes fine until, once again, the drive tries to mount and it freezes the System. You disconnect all external SCSI devices, in case it's a termination or ID issue. Restart, and boom again. Nothing is working. You reset the motherboard, pull the battery, sprinkle pixie dust on the thing, all efforts go unsuccessful. You start to get that taste in your mouth. You know the one. Its the same taste you got when you were a kid and you got caught doing something REALLY wrong and you knew you were busted. Well, I don't like that taste. So here are some things you might try. First, if the drive is an external, your job is relatively easy. If the drive is an internal, you're going to have to put the drive in an enclosure. Choose an ID that isn't being used, and make sure that it is properly terminated (or not terminated). A VERY, VERY good investment is to buy an old external hard drive in a good enclosure. You can pick one up for nothing, at a electronics fair or on an online auction. Of course, make sure it's SCSI, or whatever kind of drive bus it is. Better yet, when you upgrade your drive, don't get rid of that old external drive. Keep that enclosure for times like this, or keep it as an emergency disk. HOWEVER you do this, just get yourself a working external enclosure so you can try the following. When you boot the computer, do so with the drive turned OFF. Keep it connected to the chain, just have the power to it off when you start your computer. PLEASE, if you have an internal, don't try to boot the computer with the drive disconnected and then connect it back inside after the computer is up. This is the way you fry SCSI devices and computers. Only do these things I'm suggesting with an external or an internal you put in an external enclosure. I know that techs hot swap SCSI devices, but they know what they're doing, and it has to be done correctly. With all pins on the connector hitting at once. So, get an external enclosure. Now, when you start up the computer, let it fully start before you do anything. When it's up, boot your disk repair utility. NOW turn on the drive. Let it spin up. Then have the repair utility re scan the bus. Sometimes the utilities CAN'T mount the drive. No prob, just use SCSI Probe. Boot SCSI Probe, and mount the trashed drive. Then hop back into your repair utility right away. Tell the utility to re scan the bus again. Now run the utility on the mounted drive. BEFORE you have the utility repair ANYTHING, run the recovery portion of the software first. This way you can see if some file you REALLY need is already there, and you can do a recovery of it to a separate drive. Once you have snagged every important file you can, start the repair process. Run the sections of the repair ONE AT A TIME, and have it ASK you if you want to repair something. Make notes of each repair section, writing down each time it asks for your permission to repair something. Why? Because if the repair utility gets stuck fixing something, or it crashes at a particular point, then the next time you run it on the disk you can SKIP the repair that caused the crash. Sometimes you can skip a process that is crashing the repair utility, and let it finish the others. Then you can either go grab the files you need off of the disk, or you can re-run the repair software and a lot of times it will fix everything successfully, where before it crashed. Basically, remember this: your data is the REASON you're trying to fix the drive in the first place, most likely. It is the only thing that is irreplaceable. So, you want to get it AS SOON as you can. If you run the utility, and don't stop when the disk comes up to get your data, and you keep running the repairs, you run the risk of never getting that chance again. The utility may crash, it may ruin the drive irrevocably, and you missed the window to get your data. Lastly, another thing you can try is to take the disk off of the computer it's on and connect it to ANOTHER computer. Sometimes another computer, with possibly and older OS or a newer one, is able to mount the drive. Do this cautiously, you don't want to screw up a second computer's drive as well. Next, I'll talk about how to prepare yourself for that day when you WILL have a hard drive crash or major technical troubles. Because that day WILL come. All drives have a MTBF rating (mean time between failures). Which means that all, all, all drives will someday crash. The question will be, have you covered yourself for this inevitability. Or not. Look for the next entry in this series: "Preparing for the inevitable doomsday" Hope that helps, Bladerunner (Sean Damkroger)