I failed to recover the data, but I hope that sharing the steps I followed might help others in this situation. I e-wasted it, labelling it "shorted" with a sharpie, just in case any recycler tries to use it. Unfortunately, I think this drive is toast. Presumably the USB controller was trying to reset the drive too, and returning resource busy.
The drive is throwing exceptions when we send read ATA commands to it, and Linux tries to reset the drive to fix it, but the reset doesn't fix it. Maybe it'll work? Drive detected, then read errors, then a 'hard reset' loop. Now Linux is talking directly to the disk, without a USB controller. Its spare disk slot has been handy for reading many disks as I've been processing these inherited hard drives. I popped the raw disk into my Synology NAS. A cheap Western Digital disk inside an expensive Western Digital case, that's vertical integration! I prised the case off with a screwdriver, breaking the clips:Īnd I found the internal disk. I guess there were over 100 errors? Too many errors in dmesg. This time, so many that buffer_io_error said 103 callbacks suppressed. So I tried plugging it into one more Linux machine, but I got much the same errors. I hoped: maybe it's just the enclosure that's fried, and maybe the disk inside is still good? This was a last-resort because you have to snap the disk enclosure to open it up. two "Buffer I/O error" errors trying to read the drive ("async page read"). That seems to say we can't even read any bytes off the disk at all! Plugging the disk into my NAS and running sudo dmesg -w, I see the kernel having errors reading the disk: USB disk detected, then. macOS said the disk was 'uninitialized' (unformatted), but further tries to read the first few bytes of the disk (where the partition table is stored) failed: $ sudo cat /dev/disk4 | xxd | less However, with an alternative power supply, the disk still didn't mount. I was hoping it was 'just the power supply' that shorted, that the disk was undamaged. It should output 12V but was outputting 0V: -0.00 volts on the external drive power supply. So I tested the power supply with a multimeter. I couldn't hear the disk spin up, unless I plugged in another power supply. But the disk wasn't showing up on the computer any more. The drive had some data from a relative who passed away, so I was keen to read it. The Western Digital Drive (black, right), plugged into my NAS (left).
Later, I tried to read some data off the Western Digital My Book external hard disk I'd plugged in the night before. Prometheus graph of whether my home servers are "up". My home electricity monitoring logged its last event at 02:38am, so the power must have failed just after. We weren't sure what had tripped the fuse. The fuse had tripped, we flicked the switch to re-set it. A few mornings ago, we woke up to the power out.
0 kommentar(er)
