I recently had a HD go down. (Seagate IDE 8Mb)

I used PQ's Lost and Found to get copies of my win partition but it
could not access my ext3 partition.

Subsequently I used the excellent Seatools utility , free from the
SeaGate.com site . There is a linux file to create the needed floppy
image. This tool will detect bad sectors non-destructivly , so you get
a clear idea of the state of your disk. It will get the disk firmware
to reallocate sectors to extra free sectors to recover a fully working
disk.

This second function it can only do for SeaGate disks so see if your
manufacturer has a similar utility.

HTH


Jon Portnoy <avenj@gentoo.org> wrote in message news:<slrnbp0fdp.ruf.jdpNOSPAM@eris.oppresses.us>. ..
> On 2003-10-17, Matt. <matt_benvenuti_remove@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > hdb: dma-intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> > hdb: dma-intr: status=0x40 { UncorrectableError } LBAsect=2320860, sector
> > 103872
> > end_request: I/O error, dev 3:43 (hdb), sector 103872
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> > FILE "/usr/bin/emerge", line 1603 in unmerge
> > retval=portage.unmerge(mysplit[0], mysplit[1], portage.root,
> > unmerge_action not in ["clean","prune"])
> > FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 1960, in unmerge
> > mylink.unmerge(trimworld=mytrimworld)
> > FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 4469, in unmerge
> > mymd5=perform_md5(obj, calc_prelink=1)
> > FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 1951, in perform_md5
> > return perform_checksum(x,calc_prelink)[0]
> > FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 205, in
> > perform_checksum
> > return fchksum.fmd5t(filename)
> > IOError; [Errno 5] Input/output error: '/usr/lib/libbfd-2.13.90.0.18.so'
>
>
> Yep, your disk appears to be bad. You're going to want to run
> 'badblocks /dev/hdb' and see what it reports. It should return a list of
> bad blocks.
>
> If there are bad blocks, it's time to get a new disk.