Yep, your hard drive is bad. The 'dd' command that you ran only
read 400 meg (that's meg, not gig) of the drive before it hit an error.
hda is the whole hard drive. hda1 is the root (program) partition.
hda2 is the swap space. hda3 is where your recorded shows are
stored. If you have important recordings on hda3 and you are
willing to spend a good number of hours learning, setting up,
etc. You might be able to save some of your shows. Start by
determining if it is worth it by redoing that dd command on
hda3 instead of hda. If it gets all the way through with no errors
you might be able to rescue some recordings.
I wouldn't bother with smartmon tools since we are seeing disk
errors when simply reading the disk with dd.
I hope you don't have anything that you want to keep on it...
One thing you could try would be to unplug the hard drive cables
from both ends and maybe even remove other devices that are
on that cable. Plug just the hard drive back in and try again.
Once chance in 10000 that this will help.
Another thing to try is to make sure that the hard drive has good
ventilation and is not running hot, Open the computer case
and blow a desk fan on the hard drive for 15 minutes and try
again with the desk fan still running.
Hard drive controllers (part of the motherboard) sometimes go bad
and you can't tell whether the hard drive is bad or controller is
bad. You might move the hard drive to another computer, boot
a Knoppix (not Knoppmyth) CD and run the dd command that way.
Be aware that your hard drive will probably be something besides
/dev/hda.
When a controller goes bad it writes bad data on the hard drive.
This data can never be read by any controller. The hard drive
is still good, but it looks bad because of the bad data. Always
reformat and test a bad hard drive on another computer before
discarding it.
To install smartmontools do this:
Code:
apt-get update
apt-get install smartmontools
Make sure you don't have anything recording while doing the
smartmon tests. Do this logged in as root(reboot later to get back to MythTV):
Code:
init S
pkill xinit
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop
To test the drive then do this:
Code:
smartctl -t short /dev/hda
(takes minutes to test) or this:
Code:
smartctl -t long /dev/hda
(takes hours to test)
Wait however long it told you to wait then do this to view the test results:
Code:
smartctl -a /dev/hda | less
and look for overall pass/fail on the first page.
Warning: the following may damage the hard drive: One thing you
could try only as a last effort to copy data off of a drive that you
are about to discard would be putting the hard drive in the freezer
for 20-30 minutes and then quickly put it back in the PC, boot up,
and copy off the files you want to save.
If this were my system I would:
- move the hard drive to another PC
- boot Knoppix CD
- use dd_rescue to read the hard drive and write the same data back to it
(dd_rescue -A -d -D -b 1M -B 4096 -v /dev/hda /dev/hda)
if there is only one hard drive hda will probably be sda for recent versions of knoppix
- test the hard drive with smartctl (smartctl is already installed)
Good luck,
Cliff
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