any hope if I can't see the drive in lshw?
MacBook with SATA drive formatted as HFS+. Drive won't boot.
I stuck in Rescue Remix and booted the MacBook off that. The CD boots fine but I don't see the drive i.e. there is no /dev/sda. lshw also does not show a drive connected to the drive controller.
I also removed the MacBook drive and stuck it in an old Pentium machine with a PCI SATA card. The card BIOS loops infinitely looking for the drive so there was no way to boot anything at all while the drive is connected. (the card works fine with other drives.) But when I tried this, I could hear what the drive does: it spins up, makes the dreaded clicking noise --- sounds like a head not seeking --- then finally powers itself down.
So is there any hope if I can't see the drive, partition, etc.? What's my next step? There is some important data on this thing and no backup....
Thanks in advance for any help/tips,
-John
Hi John. If the BIOS cannot
Hi John.
If the BIOS cannot see the drive, then there is not much you can do short of fixing the hardware problem. And that's beyond the scope of Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix.
You can always try to use a USB-SATA connector. That way, you can see the kernel messages (in /var/log/messages) as you power cycle or plug/unplug the drive.
I run
tail -f /var/log/messages
in one terminal while trying the drive.
Sometimes, the drive will only appear for a few moments and then the kernel may quit trying. You can try to start ddrescue and catch it. This has worked for me a few times, but I can't say for certain that's exactly what happened - maybe it was luck? I always assume that when I plug in the drive, it will be the very last time it will spit out any data; so I am ready to go at that point.