media descriptor issue help please

[garys at email.com]

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Dave Stevens"
  To: fedora-list at redhat.com
  Subject: media descriptor issue help please
  Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:04:20 -0700


  Hi,

  I have a F7 box that works fine. Recently a Windows computer was hit
  by a
  stray 220 volt jolt and the power supply died. I will in due course
  replace
  the power supply and see if the mobo is hooped, but for the moment I
  am
  really interested in seeing if I can recover the data off the drive.
  I've put
  the drive, a Seagate ATA 40 gig into the F7 drive where it lives
  alongside
  the primary (F7) drive, a Seagate SATA 320.

  The BIOS correctly detects the type and model of the ATA drive and
  the dmesg
  messages indicate that it is correctly detected. The BIOS messages
  state the
  capacity and interface correctly and say that S.M.A.R.T. is enabled
  and no
  errors are detected. If I set the box to boot from the ATA drive
  Windows XP
  tries to boot and offers a set of boot options. No matter which one I
  choose
  Windows starts to boot then acts as if it can't deal with the
  drastically
  different hardware it finds and reboots.

  This leads me to believe that there is recoverable data on the drive
  but I
  can't mount it in F7. Messages from dmesg read in part as below:

  ata7: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x00000000000101f0 ctl 0x00000000000103f6
  bmdma
  0x000000000001ffa0 irq 14
  ata8: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x0000000000010170 ctl 0x0000000000010376
  bmdma
  0x000000000001ffa8 irq 15
  ata7.00: ATA-6: ST340810A, 3.39, max UDMA/100
  ata7.00: 78165360 sectors, multi 16: LBA
  ata7.00: configured for UDMA/100

  The drive is jumpered and cabled as primary master

  A mounting attempt onto empty directory /mnt/win gives :

  [root at localhost mnt]# mount /dev/sdb -t vfat win
  mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
  missing codepage or other error
  In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
  dmesg | tail or so

  [root at localhost mnt]# dmesg | tail
  Bluetooth: HIDP (Human Interface Emulation) ver 1.2
  ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
  ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
  Netfilter messages via NETLINK v0.30.
  nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (8192 buckets, 65536 max)
  eth0: no IPv6 routers present
  hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock
  hfs: unable to find HFS+ superblock
  FAT: invalid media value (0xb9)
  VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb.

  So it seems that there is an invalid media descriptor on the ATA
  drive. But
  the information seems to not be conclusive because in fact the
  Windows boot
  sector is detected and a partial boot into Windows does in fact take
  place. I
  don't know what to make of this or what to do next.

  Ideas? Diagnostics?

  Dave

  I have an adapter ide=usb with power supply ( about $20 US ) for just
  such a problem - allows you to read
  the disk without booting issues - like a flash drive. Knoppix is
  sometimes helpful as well.   ----gary

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