On Tuesday September 23 2008 10:37:49 Ian Young wrote: > To add to the list of tools Andy mentioned: ddrescue is similar to dd, > but is really great about not choking, even if your disk is in terrible > shape. parted has its own rescue function that will try to find lost > partitions, without you needing to know exactly where they were. And > check out TestDisk and PhotoRec - they are brilliant tools, and can come > through when all hope seems lost. > > Of course, all of these tools can only help if the computer at least > recognizes that the drive is there, which is your problem. > > Try entering your BIOS setup and see if the drive shows up there. Also, > try getting your ear close to the drive when you power on the computer > and see if you can hear it spinning up. > > Also, keep trying. Try plugging it in again tomorrow. Try plugging it > in two weeks from now. I can't give any rational explanation for why > this would help, but I've seen drives that everyone has given up on > inexplicably come back from the dead and become recognized again out of > the blue. Of course, if this does happen, don't turn off your computer > and do copy all your data somewhere else ASAP. > > Good luck! > > Ian Thank you all for the kind replies and encouragement. I was pretty distraught when I sent that message last night; I had been banging my head against this for about 12 hours. So I left after I sent the email to the list, got out of the house for the night, just got back now. And would you believe it, sdd came home too. I checked in the BIOS and it did see a 200GB drive in the slot (yesterday it didn't). I fired it up, and there it was. dmesg doesn't have a thing to say about it, and I have no explanation other than voodoo magick. Which I wholeheartedly accept. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy a backup drive. -pete -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080923/9191facb/attachment.htm -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080923/9191facb/attachment.pgp