fdisk "unable to open" /dev/hdb

[Jacques B.]

On 8/30/06, neidorff <neidorff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>  My wife's hard disk stopped booting, and her backup is corrupt.  (of
> course)
>
>  I took the disk and put it as a slave (/dev/hdb) in a linux machine.
> Booted up.  fdisk reported that it is "unable to open" the drive.  Now this
> is weird.  The bios reports that the drive is there when I power on.  This
> is a different error than a missing disk, that error is "unable to read".
> Anyone have any idea what type of failure I have on the disk and how to read
> it to recover data?
>
>  Many, many thanks,
>
>  Mark
>
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>
What is the output of dmesg for hdb?  That should give you a good
idea.  You could run foremost (Linux free file carver available from
sourceforge.net) on the physical device (assuming Linux can at least
see the physical device - you can test this with something as simple
as strings /dev/hdb | head).  That would allow you to carve out
certain file types to another drive before re-formatting it.

Jacques B.