Forward: This is a post I royally goofed on; I started it as a page, and lost it completely. I hope you enjoy it. LINK back to original post.
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Good Morning from my Robotics Lab, this is Shadow_8472 and today, I am looking deeper into the “failed” hard drive from before. Let’s get started.
So, last week, I stuck Linux Mint on a thumb drive and did a backup for a failing computer’s hard drive. With a new, replacement computer set up, the old HDD (Hard Disk Drive) from the failed computer was extracted and connected to my computer from earlier. Yes, the one from the video. Now, I never formatted the one I installed, and I don’t have the correct equipment to mount the old HDD properly (namely the correct mounting or another SATA cable): I yanked the new SSD and connected the old HDD. It’s currently sitting outside my open case. I ran a few tests on it, but everything came back clean. The worst thing I found was 4 KB of data in bad sectors. For perspective, that is almost nothing. If that is the boot sector, that could be everything… maybe I should boot to it? I think I will do that.
But before I go into giving the result, I’d like to share a little history my father provided. I had the HDD on the outside of my computer, and I was turning it so as to put a little less strain on the power cord. My father was cringing as I rotated it. He said hard drives used to be sensitive as to what orientation they were in when they were formatted. For example, a hard drive wouldn’t work if it was formatted parallel to the ground and was turned on its side. Today, such a proposition would seem silly, but I figure it was because we later learned to make more resilient motor control for the read heads.
Another mini-topic of interest is how I emptied a number of additional USB sticks in preparation for making them Linux bootable. I ended up only doing one. I stuck Ubuntu MATE on it. I don’t think I will use it on the failed system if the instability can’t be fixed, though. I would still like a MineCraft server; such a computer would be best set up with a server version of Linux, but I am not ready for that.
Reacting to my own question from last week, about learning by reaching for quick and maybe easy tutorials vs learning slow and steady, I think there are times for both, but I find I have an easier time when I’m not on a deadline for results. At the same time, when I don’t have a deadline, the procrastinator in me flares up.
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The final results are in: the little Chkdsk stunt with repair stunt worked. I was able to boot the drive successfully two consecutive times. I won’t vouch for its speed or the fact that that copy of Windows somehow missed my bigger monitor, and had the audacity to call it older than the one it actually found. Jokes aside, it did say some older monitors might not automatically connect. Detect monitors didn’t find it either. I don’t really care. The problem I set out to solve is fixed, and the drive is now pulled from my system.
Final Question: I know I said I would like to do a monthly video, but at this time, I don’t know if I can keep up on the ideas. Until I get a bigger project, I will probably just make a video when I am doing something new and hardware related. What would would you like to see in such a video?