hard drive look to me is dead

[SCC_2]

Hello All,
What a bad year, One of my external hard drive look to me is dead since I can't here it spinning at all. When I boot up the dive it say "devoffline", is there any company in Canada can recover the data from that drive for me ?
Thanks !
Scc

[Uwe Zessin]

Hm, not all disk drives spin up automatically if you power them up, but OpenVMS is clever and knows how to tell a SCSI disk drive to start. If the drive still does not come online, yes, it looks like it is dead. Sorry to hear that!

[Karl Rohwedder]

Sometimes it helps to use a little hammer and knock on disk to spin it up.

regards Kalle

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Or even slightly shaking the drive might solve the problem. Or dropping on a table from a few cm hight.

Wim

[Uwe Zessin]

A disk drive is a sensitive device and bumping it with a hard mass induces high G-forces which might make the situation worse. So that might be acceptable if as a last try and if you don't want to give it to a data recovery company.

[SCC_2]

I find out is the ext. power supply cause the problem. Now I can reboot the system. But There are some error while reboot saying
i/o error reading header 191 on relative volume 1.....
too many file header error - rebuild aborted.
I still can login in but is there a way to force the system to repair the drive.
Sc

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

You can try a manual[1] rebuild:
$ ANALYZE /DISK_STRUCTURE /REPAIR device:

but from the message it sounds like some sectors on the disk that contain file headers are bad.

[1] the operating system has discovered that the volume was not dismounted properly and tries an automatic rebuild during implicitly mounting the system disk. You can hack around this by doing a conversational boot and then:
SYSBOOT> set acp_rebuildsysd 0
(I hope that's right - it's from memory).


It's possible that power fluctuations damaged the data on the disk drive. I would not try to continue with that volume, but rather try a backup in case you need some data and then do a restore from backup media or a new installation.

The reason is that there might be errors in data sectors, too. You might try to find them out by a:
$ ANALYZE /DISK_STRUCTURE /READ ...

but who knows if some data hasn't been corrupted already?