Fix dead hard drive?

[TheGuyWithTheFace]

Hi everyone!

A while back, I upgraded my laptop to an SSD. (Best thing I've ever done!) At the time, I was dual booting windows and Ubuntu on a 600Gb HDD. When I went to a 256GB SSD, I concluded that windows was a waste of space, and did not put it on the SSD. (Second best thing I've ever done! ) I kept the old hard drive though, and now, unfortunately, I have to use windows 7 for a class I'm taking. I know this is not a windows forum, but if I could boot the HDD, I have a plan to move windows to virtualbox, so that's taken care of. The issue is, when I plug it into my laptop, it won't boot.

Once before, I had to use it, and when I tried to plug it in via SATA to USB connection, I got grub, and my old Ubuntu install worked, but I had to plug it into the original spot inside my laptop to get windows to boot without a BSOD. Now, though, when I plugged it in, (via a USB connection first, then when that didn't work, I plugged it in directly through the SATA 2 port.) Grub failed to work at all. I had a spare USB lying around, so I tried to do a grub-repair, which has worked for me in the past:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Alas, when I finished that and tried to start up, I got a disk read error before I even got to GRUB...

When I try to mount the hard drive from a running Ubuntu 12.04 or Lubuntu 12.10 install, I get this error:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_mst_post_read_fixup_warn: magic: 0x43425355 size: 4096 usa_ofs: 2002 usa_count: 65535: Invalid argument
Actual VCN (0x80000a0b9310000) of index buffer is different from expected VCN (0x0).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb2': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

Gparted reports that the partitions are there, but the file type for the ubuntu partition is not recognized, and the windows partition is complaining about bad sectors or something, but those errors were there when I was constantly using the old hard drive before I upgraded.

My question is, did I just completely fry my old hard drive, or is there a way I could revive it?

Also, I put this in general help, because I'm not sure if my hardware issue is caused by a software malfunction, (i.e. grub), but to any moderators reading this, should this be in the hardware section?

[sudodus]

No I don't think you fried your HDD. Maybe you have damaged the linux file system (root or /).

Boot from another drive and do not mount any partition on this HDD. Unmount if they are auto-mounted, and check with

df

Then you can try to repair the file system with

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdxy

where x is the drive letter, typically a if only one internal drive, and y is the partition number.

[TheGuyWithTheFace]

Hi sudodus, thanks for your quick response!

I'm not sure what I'm looking for with the df command, but here's the output:

/dev/sda1 19684632 7395764 11288932 40% /
udev 2997220 4 2997216 1% /dev
tmpfs 3009232 12 3009220 1% /tmp
tmpfs 1203696 956 1202740 1% /run
none 5120 8 5112 1% /run/lock
none 3009232 636 3008596 1% /run/shm
tmpfs 3009232 0 3009232 0% /var/spool
tmpfs 3009232 92 3009140 1% /var/tmp
tmpfs 3009232 844 3008388 1% /var/log
/dev/sda2 225955260 70147276 144330076 33% /home
/home/TheGuy/.Private 225955260 70147276 144330076 33% /home/TheGuy

The e2fsck command didn't seem very happy with me:

e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

I'm not sure what the super-block is, or the magic number, but I know I don't have any ext2 filesystems on there...

[sudodus]

The e2fsck command didn't seem very happy with me:

I'm sorry, you should run e2fsck on partitions so in your case

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda1
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda2

I'm not sure what the super-block is, or the magic number, but I know I don't have any ext2 filesystems on there...

[TheGuyWithTheFace]

I just read (some of) this article:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/surviv...-failures.html

And it seems pretty helpful.

I used mke2fs -n /dev/sdb to see the info about the hdd, and got this:

mke2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
/dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
39075840 inodes, 156282965 blocks
7814148 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
4770 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000

I just picked one of the superblock backups, and used the suggested command:

e2fsck -f -b 819200 /dev/sdb

and got the same error as in my previous post. *sigh* I'll keep trying...

[TheGuyWithTheFace]

Sorry, I didn't realize in my last post that you had already replied.

Ok, so I tried:

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb2
(sdb2 was my windows partition, which is what I really wanted,but one step at a time...)

Not surprisingly, I got the same error as before.

I then tried:

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb5

Which is my Ubuntu partition, and I got this:

e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
Superblock has an invalid journal (inode 8).
Clear<y>?

I'm a little afraid to "clear" it, so I'm just leaving that terminal window open for now...

[alphaamanitin]

If I understand correctly you want to boot into the windows install on the now, external HDD? AFAIK, Windows WILL NOT boot from external drives without a bit of work during the install. I am not sure you can get it to boot once removing the drive from the computer.

AlphaA

[TheGuyWithTheFace]

Yes, a while back, to get it to boot I had to put it back in. The issue is now even when it's inside my computer I can't boot into it. (right now It's connected via USB so I can try to restore it, though.) Once I get Ubuntu/GRUB back, my plan is to put it back into my computer, boot into windoze, factory reset it, take an image of the hard drive in .iso format, and then use that .iso to make a virtualbox install on my regular ssd. That may be a little too much information, but for now my chief concern is booting into it at all...

[alphaamanitin]

You can try putting the drive back in, and running the windows boot manager repair program from a windows install disk, or use SuperGrub to check. It makes me think that the MBR on the drive for windows is damaged.

AlphaA

[sudodus]

This is your second drive /dev/sdb

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb2
(sdb2 was my windows partition, which is what I really wanted,but one step at a time...)

Not surprisingly, I got the same error as before.

I then tried:

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb5

Which is my Ubuntu partition, and I got this:

I'm a little afraid to "clear" it, so I'm just leaving that terminal window open for now...

I think you can clear the invalid journal (inode 8). Let us hope that will solve your problem. Maybe there will be another error to be fixed too.

From your earler post (post #3) you had mounted only your first drive /dev/sda

/dev/sda1 19684632 7395764 11288932 40% /
/dev/sda2 225955260 70147276 144330076 33% /home

Is this correct? According to this listing of df, your root partition is
/dev/sda1 and your home partition is /dev/sda2

Anyway you should use Windows tools to repair windows partitions

chkdsk /f X:

Only use e2fsck for linux ext partitions!