[vox-tech] Hard Drive Partitioning Errors

[Richard Crawford]

I've taken that bad HD out of my computer and I'm messing around with it now.  
There's nothing critical on the disk, so I'm attempting to run some tests and 
see if anything can be done with it.

Executing:

$ sudo e2fsck -c /dev/hdb

yields this:

e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while 
trying to open /dev/hdb
Could this be a zero-length partition?

I tried:

$ sudo parted -i /dev/hdb mklabel msdos

which resulted in:

Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/hdb
Retry/Ignore/Cancel?   

From what little I can figure, I can't really do much with this hard drive 
unless it has a partition table.

Just for kicks, I also tried:

$ mke2fs -S /dev/hdb

which gave me these errors:

Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block from filesystem 
resulted in short write

and

Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks.done

I also tried

$ mke2fs -c /dev/hdb

which returned no errors, but e2fsck still bombed with the same error message.


As far as I can tell, this HD is perfectly pooched. I should point out that I 
don't really know what I'm doing, just grasping at straws and doing searches 
on Google for each error message that comes up.  Is there a better way of 
doing this sort of thing and actually fixing the hard drive? Or is it hosed 
for good?


-- 
Richard S. Crawford (http://www.mossroot.com)
"That which does not kill me makes me stranger."
    -Llewellyn, from Ozy & Millie