trying to resurrect a hardrive after IDE interface failure

Hi folks,

Some sad story:
I have an Amiga1200 with Eyetech's buffered EIDE1200 (if I remember correctly the interface name) a thunderstorm came, fried the EIDE board. Now trying to bring the HD (WD800JB) back to life using CF2IDE adapter, bad luck so far. Managed to boot into OS3.9 CD, so the IDE port is OK it recognizes the HD, size is wrong: 7.8 GB instead of 80, no RDB, reported by HDToolBox from OS3.9 emergency boot. When I select the HD it warns about destroying all data (probably wants to initialize it, didn't go further). Setpatch I have on the emergency floppy (worked at it's age!) is 44.2, idefix: 114.19, loadide 3.2. Anything else I can try to improve the situation except from initializing the HD?

Huge thanks...

@Jack

Bad story.

If you want to do it as much as possible in an amiga-ish environment, try with AmigaForever (the FAQs and Guides for the whole package are very good) or with WinUAE.

First thing I would do is to create an (dd) image of the entire HD.

Then you might then try to recover the files (in WinUAE or AF) from _a_copy_ of the HD image using DiskSalv or some other Tool within the emulation. You can try all sorts of things on the copy of the image without fear of loosing data.
(hash test the copy if you feel the need to)

here a starting point:
https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/15-113

Besides that, I once recovered files using RAW mode with a recovery tool on macOS. Even if it did not understand the filesystem I found the data I was looking for.

Good luck!

Amigo1:

Quote:
Thanks for the advice, will dd the file in Linux, actually 1-st thing I did is to run smartctl test on the HD in Linux, didn't check what disk size the Linux recognizes it with.
Quote:
I have MacOS here, do you recall which tool?

Thanks

@Jack

sad story sounds very familiar unfortunately
I managed to get my info on my real HD back using DiskSalv4. If HDToolBox sees the drive then good chance DiskSalv4 can see it too and do some magic to repair it hopefully...good luck and remember to always backup your important files !

@Jack

Instead of "dd" You can create also create a copy of your HDD using winuae.
It has the advantage of being a harddisk file which can be used directly in UAE,
FS-UAE so you can try to recover the files with DiskSalv.
VmWare or VirtualBox do host WinUAE very well on macOS or Linux.

I'm not sure anymore If I used "DiskDrill" or "remo Recover".
I do remember both worked reliably.. There should be downloadable test versions
on their respective websites.


Edit: it was DiskDrill

Coming up after a long while:

DD-ing the hd and looking with hex editor at it shows RDRK in the header (5244524B, then follow: 81800000 08FFFFFF)
then appears some data with readable ascii string, such as WDB followed by 80, then some readable partition table data. Looking up RDB header found RDSK, not RDRK. Is it valid header?

Gone to dig amiga forever I Have somewhere and try to look at the image with hdtoolbox.

@Jack
Years ago Jens Maus recovered the lost NList sources from a hard drive with burnt electronics by purchasing a new drive identical to the burnt one and moving the circuit board to the burnt drive.

@xenic

I do have a backup, the intention was to resurrect the drive which is apparently readable (at least by dd).

At the moment I transferred the backup of system partition to a card flash : formatted the flash on the amiga side and made it bootable, transferred to a Linux box with a built-in CF reader, dd-ed it to a file, moved it to mac, restored files onto it with UAE , moved the file back to Linux dd-ed onto the CF. Now I have trouble loading workbench (initially I had a pixel64 card which I removed at the moment, trying to work with aga screenmodes and dcandoubler/flickerfixer, moved the pixel64 monitor file to Storage/monitors, trying to sort out the startup-sequence).

Now stuck with:
Error "ramlib/80000006" when starting loadwb.
Looking it up on the web brought some mentioning that it could be related to the fact that I am using files from backup. Did anyone encounter a similar situation?

Thanks.