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Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

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Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

Postby smallcog » Wed Jul 30, 2008 6:18 pm

Hello,
My wife picked up my computer bag which I hadn't closed properly. Result : A 1 yard/meter fall onto a wooden floor. From a domestic peace point of view we're both to blame so that's cool.
Problem is my Amilo no longer boots. I get to the Fujitsu-Siemens splash screen with the F2/F12 options on the bottom.
The F2 gives me the "Please Wait.." message on the bottom and the F12 does nothing.
The progress bar on the bottom makes it to about 60% across and then freezes for 10 seconds before rebooting and repeating the same process.
When I listen to the hard drive it doesn't make any strange noises, then again I never listened to it before.
I cannot boot from DVD/CD.

I'm thinking a sick disk and will go buy another one for a clean install unless someone has ideas to the contrary that could help me out.
If anyone has any suggestions for disk recovery tools to get my data from the sick disk that would be most appreciated also. Don't even ask if I had a full up-to-date backup.

I'll be most grateful for any advice / Colm
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Re: Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

Postby smallcog » Wed Jul 30, 2008 10:20 pm

Been thinking about this a bit more. If I can't get into the BIOS using F2, then doesn't this mean that the machine is buggered before the hard drive is needed ? If this is the case then I'm looking at a motherboard replacement as I've seen on the web that the AMILO line has a soldered BIOS chip and can only be reset by changing the motherboard. Any experience of this anyone ?

/ Colm
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Re: Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

Postby smallcog » Wed Jul 30, 2008 10:30 pm

More notes to self :

I remove the hard drive and now I can access BIOS and also boot from DVD/CD. This is good news, i.e. motherboard/BIOS not dead. I will probably try to recover the data from the disk through another PC and then try to reinstall XP either on the same disk if I can reformat it on another PC or else on a new disk.

/ Colm
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Re: Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

Postby aspettl » Wed Jul 30, 2008 10:37 pm

Hi

Try to recover the data - if this works without problems, then you can run a diagnostic tool to read the SMART data.
Even if everything looks ok (and you don't want to buy a new hdd), create backups regularly... you can't trust the disk anymore.

Regards
Aaron
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Re: Can AMILO Pi 1536 be saved after fall of death ?

Postby hikaru » Fri Aug 01, 2008 8:06 am

Get a new disk!
Anyway you need one for your backup, so be consequent and throw away the old one.

To save your data plug the old disk and a new one that has at least the same size to a computer and boot a random Linux (maybe some Live-CD).
Then find out how the HDDs are called. Most likely it will be /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.
Then copy the raw data from the old HDD to the new one with dd. Depending on the disk size this can take up to 2 hours.

Assuming that the old HDD is sda and the new one is sdb, become root and issue the following command in a console:
Code: Select all
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
This will copy every single byte from one HDD to the other regardless of any defective sectors or file systems as long as the HDD works physically and the controller is ok. *
Afterwards your new HDD is a 1:1-copy of your old one and you can recover your data.
In the best case you can just install the new HDD in your notebook without even noticing any change.

* Make sure that sda and sdb is correct, don't mix them up or your data will be lost!
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