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Laptop - Disk read error
john fechon
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was using my laptop this morning and turned it off to go to lunch. When I came back, I turned it on and it gave me a bios startup I don't usually see and it finished with CMOS checksum error. When I tell it to load defaults and boot up, it tells me I have a disk read error, ctrl-alt-delete to reboot.
The CMOS thing seemed to be fixed by telling it to boot with the default values, but the disk read error isn't going away. The hard drives are raided(is that the proper word?) and I'd like to keep some of the data on them. Are they boned or is there a way to still salvage this?
If it helps, its an alienware, and keep with a 'respawn' disk that I'm assuming will boot it to day one configurations, which will do no good if the hardware is failing.
The CMOS thing seemed to be fixed by telling it to boot with the default values, but the disk read error isn't going away. The hard drives are raided(is that the proper word?) and I'd like to keep some of the data on them. Are they boned or is there a way to still salvage this?
If it helps, its an alienware, and keep with a 'respawn' disk that I'm assuming will boot it to day one configurations, which will do no good if the hardware is failing.
john fechon on
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Its Raid 0. I can't check the internet til I get to work, but I noticed last night that it might not be the hard drives. When I hit the power on button, it won't turn on unless I have the AC cord unplugged. It will only turn on if its running off pure battery power. Still won't boot, but it gives me hope that its only some other piece of hardware.
What are possible ways to access and recover data from the two hard drives? I've never tried to recover from raided disks before, though I do have an adapter for connecting a single laptop drive to a PC.
There's no easy way to, and you're most likely going to pay out the ass to do it. The one downside to RAIDs is when they go bad, they go bad. Their upside for them when not in raid 0 only is that they help reliability and help recover from crashes like DREs, raid 0 is just for performance.
Disk read errors usually means there's a problem with the drive internally, however, you could be having motherboard issues altogether, and since this is a laptop this is even more complicated.
Pretty much what Bowen said.
Is your laptop still under any kind of warrenty? If so I would be calling the manufacturer asap. Also, while it may sound cool to be running RAID 0. You take a big chance of both harddrives crapping out on you and losing everything. If I were you and the laptop was still under some kind of warrenty I would ask them if they could make it so you have 2 individual hard drives as opposed to 2 that are thinking as one. You would lose a little bit of performance, but not so much that your computer would be a snail. Plus you would double your hard drive space. Its just a thought. Best of luck.
A raid 0 with 5400 RPM laptop drives is worse than two 7200 RPM laptop drives not in a raid. Something in me wants to think some people do this to make more money for no reason at all.
As for the making money thing I think the word RAID is kinda a buzz word that people use as a status symbol. "Dude I just spent $3,000 on this PC and it has RAID!!!" (OP I'm not referencing you in the aforementioned remark; rather the people I have known throughout my life to sink thousands of dollars into a PC they know next to nothing about).
Oh, you guys don't have to tell me, I regret ever having anything to do with raid 0. But the warranty ran out over a year ago.
Right now all I'm concerned about is the data on the laptop. I'd prefer to get it, but I don't want to pay alot of money that will probably be going to fix whatever is wrong with the laptop (assuming its not actually the HD's). If the HD's are what went bad, then I can replace and reformat everything.
Anyone know if I can mount the drives in linux? The laptop had Windows XP on it.
http://ask.metafilter.com/90237/How-can-I-mount-WD-Worldbook-drives-in-Linux
In that example it seems the drives were already linux partitions, but would it work for windows too? Or is there a windows equivalent I could try?
What non-replacable data is on the discs?
The only thing I really care about are the pictures. Some of them only exist on that laptop. After work, once I'm off the clock, I'm going to check out trying them on another computer.
there's no way you'll be able to read anything from them if you set them up without RAID. RAID 0 stripes are typically really fucking small.
Good luck getting the pictures.
Almost nobody uses RAID3, you're probably thinking of RAID5, which is similar and also requires a min. of 3 disks. But this is highly unlikely to exist in a laptop, even a high end laptop.
RAID0 is Striping, also known as the non-RAID level because it is not, in fact, a Redundant Array of Independant Disks. Each disk carries 1/n (where n is the number of disks in the array) of the data from every block, and neither can function without the other. Every device that advertises RAID capability supports RAID0.
RAID1 is Mirroring, both drives have exactly the same data and are therefore redundant, either can function without the other. Most devices that advertise RAID capability support RAID1.
RAID3 is Stripe with dedicated Parity, each disk carries 1/n-1 of the data, with one disk only holding parity data from the others, if any one disk fails the data can be recreated from the parity (or if the parity disk fails the data still exists on the other disks in it's normal form). Few devices outside of Enterprise Grade RAID controller boards support RAID3.
RAID5 is Striping with distributed Parity, each disk carries mostly it's own data, but a chunk of each disk contains some parity info from the other drives. That way, if any one drive fails, the data can be recreated from the parity info on the remaining drives. Many devices that advertise RAID support RAID5.
I've removed the HD's, and I'm using the alienware site to remove the CMOS, which is awesomely behind some board covered by the SLI cable which is held in place with masking tape.
I noticed without the HD's it will still fail the CMOS checksum, but I'm not sure if that means anything in this case. (The laptop is always unplugged when I'm digging through it)
Really, all of them went up at the same exact time. Even when I remove the hard drives it gives the same errors? Could it be just one thing mister I do this for a living? When i asked about getting data off the drives, he told me it wasn't possible. Not because the drives were bad, I managed to convince him that there was a chance they were still good. He had no idea how to get data from the laptop hard drives to a PC. He'd never even seen an adapter like the one I had in my hands. He also said RAID 0 was very bad. Thanks, hadn't figured that out yet.
There a better place for disk recovery?
There's a microcenter near me, and they seem much better about building your own computer, so maybe they'll have a solution.
I'm calling alienware up tomorrow, despite my warranty being done, and seeing if they can recommend a method to recover data, but I'm not expecting much from them.