[arch-general] Bad Magic Number in Superblock - Any trick for Arch or for new kernels?

[David C. Rankin]

On 06/09/2010 03:14 PM, Sergey Manucharian wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Excerpts from David C. Rankin's message of Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:16 -0500:
> 
>> 	Before I add the drive to the heap of drives in my 'dead
>> drive box' are there any other silver bullets I should try to try and
>> resurrect the drive? (Data isn't an issue, it's all backed up :-)
> 
> I had similar situation (just a couple of days ago) with my friend's
> USB flash drive, which has fallen dead accidentally being transferred
> from one computer to another. The symptoms were very similar. After
> half an hour of trying to read outputs and resurrect it I've decided to
> disassemble it. The quartz resonator's leg was torn off the board. I've
> soldered it back - everything was back - partitions and data.
> 
> This long story is a hint that you may have an electronics failure in
> your HDD. Just a physicist's opinion ;-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Sergey
> 

I'll take that physicists opinion to heart. With the drive out, I powered it up
on my glass coffee table for the usb connection. I have probably powered 30-50
drives like this and you get an 'ear' for whether there are problems with the drive.

In this case it sounded perfect. A bit slow to spin up (~ 2 sec lag in spinup),
but nothing major. After spinup, the read-write head did just what it was
supposed to: uncaged, a quick swing through the extent of its range of motion,
then promptly settled and sounded like it was saying "OK, I'm here, I'm ready to
read/write like I'm supposed to -- where's the requests?"

The drives balance was notably perfect. Being an off/old brand (MTD) I was
expecting slop. Nope, it put the new Seagates to shame.

If the drive had just cratered, I would expect more noise from the read-write
head searching for partition boundaries, etc.

(But.... There's not a damn thing I can do to check --> my vacuum chamber is on
the fritz :-)

I'll dork with it a bit more, then it's in the box with the rest of my collection...

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com