Linux made my hard drive disapear :( it still spins !

oneofusjustin

Member
Feb 18, 2008
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ok so i have a samsung 200 gig hard drive and it has ALL my data on it as well as a second partition that runs Ubuntu i was trying to boot ubuntu when it has some error with the hard drive i cannot recall what it said but it was somethign like error in this area then gave some numbers and hit Y if you wanan fix so i kept hittign Y when it would come up prolly about 30 times and then it still wouldnt boot so i reset the machine... now when it FIRST starts up it would find the cpu and ram and would hang when it says "detecting ide devices" the HDD is sata tho.. and after about 30 seconds it would contiue with the boot and load windows which is on my main hard drive but the second hard drive is nowhere to be found.. i looke din bios and ran a hdd utility and they cannot see it, but it still spins and gets warm and makes no funny sounds. any ideas?
 

Linflas

Lifer
Jan 30, 2001
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Maybe download a Ubuntu live .iso and see if you can mount it after booting from it? When you say Windows doesn't see it do you mean in disk manager it doesn't even show up as unknown partition type or anything?
 
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oneofusjustin

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Feb 18, 2008
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i tried a live disc it couldnt see it either, windows cant see it anywhere and bios wont pull it up or some generic HDD diag tool
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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If the BIOS won't detect it then you have a hardware problem which isn't something Linux can cause. Linux may have been the last one to touch it, but most likely it was going to die anyway.
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
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If the BIOS won't detect it then you have a hardware problem which isn't something Linux can cause. Linux may have been the last one to touch it, but most likely it was going to die anyway.
+1

All HDs fail sooner or later, I guess you found out when your 'later' was. :(
 

oneofusjustin

Member
Feb 18, 2008
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is it possible that when i was just blindly hitting Y and "fixing" whatever errors ubuntu found on the drive that it did something? i mean it was workign right before that
 

Voo

Golden Member
Feb 27, 2009
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There's nothing that Linux could do to the HDD that the bios won't recocgnize it any more. And yes the very definition of "broken" is, that it worked before that state..
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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is it possible that when i was just blindly hitting Y and "fixing" whatever errors ubuntu found on the drive that it did something? i mean it was workign right before that

No, what it was doing was a fsck which is similar to a chkdsk in Windows. It's possible that the filesystem could've been made worse from the fsck, but not the drive itself.
 

Linflas

Lifer
Jan 30, 2001
15,395
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Have you tried moving it to a different SATA port? Also you mentioned that you suddenly began seeing IDE detect messages on the BIOS splash. Have you checked in the BIOS to makes sure the settings are correct for the controller the drive is on?