Problems mounting an old IDE disk

[brundles]

I'm hoping someone can help with this one...

The IT dept at my other halfs company is too busy to retrieve data on a disk after replacing a failed PC. As a result, the missus has brought the disk (40GB ATA133 IDE disk) back with her for me to grab it from.

In theory no problem, bung it in in the USB caddy, plug it in, job done. In practise not so simple.

Connecting the caddy to an XP machine (a laptop) gives the error that the disk isn't formatted and would I like to format it - not ideal given the circumstances.

Ubuntu meanwhile initially reports that the disk may be either corrupt or in a RAID config. For a 40GB disk out of a machine that's 6+ years old I suspect it's not RAID though! Further poking around gives me the following:

Disk /dev/sdb: 41.1 GB, 41110142976 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4998 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa0aea0ae

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1           4       32098+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sdb2   *           5        4997    40106272+   7  HPFS/NTFS
keith@HTPC:/media$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/null
dd: reading `/dev/sdb2': Input/output error
14176+0 records in
14176+0 records out
7258112 bytes (7.3 MB) copied, 2.76079 s, 2.6 MB/s

So essentially it thinks it has 40GB for the partition I'm interested in, but a request to copy the entire disk only gives back 7.3MB

Other than hooking it up to an XP desktop (which I don't have here) in the hope it can fix the mess it created, does anybody have any other ideas?

Thanks!

[Scrubbs]

maybe there is only 7.3meg of data on it? only guessing

[altis]

I'd find out who the drive manufacturer is and then go and get some of their disk utilities. You may need to plug it into a real IDE interface though. That'll tell you what's going on.

[brundles]

Originally Posted by Scrubbs

maybe there is only 7.3meg of data on it? only guessing

I'd go with that if you could fit a full XP install, MS Office and years of e-mail/documents in 7.3 meg...

Originally Posted by altis

I'd find out who the drive manufacturer is and then go and get some of their disk utilities. You may need to plug it into a real IDE interface though. That'll tell you what's going on.

I'm thinking it's going to need a proper IDE interface too . I was hoping to be able to pull the data off it tonight but it looks like it'll have to wait until tomorrow.


Thanks for the replies though.

Is this not against data protection???

[brundles]

I suspect technically you're right as I'm pretty sure I don't factor in the companies data protection register anywhere! Unfortunately the only other option my wife has is to lose the contents of the disk including data they need for audit trails and legal purposes. I'd rather their IT dept did it, but they struggle to get a fixed PC most of the time never mind with data in tact.

In this instance I'm just trying to move the data between 2 of their disks so that the original user can actually carry on doing their work. (And yes, I know that doesn't change any technicalities of DP laws)

[popper]

my guess is the USB to IDE is messing up the original
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4998 cylinders
or rather its useing different settings to the original broken PC bios it came out of.

the data's still there, its reading some of the fat tables but cant read the full data
properly until you load up the right heads/cylinders/sectors as it was using in the old PC.

that may be picked up right on a real IDE cable or you may still need to change these settings and thats a problem unless you can find out what the original ones were or you get lucky and pick the right ones.

iv seen this many times in the distant past and that is most likely the problem,
fixing it is hit and miss unless you know these original Bios settings sorry to say.

is it against the DPA, only if its holding personal data that isnt yours without permission.

[brundles]

Thanks popper - that makes sense. The original PC is now long gone for any useful purposes, but I should be able to get it running in a desktop PC even with the manual BIOS settings.