HDD can't be accessed anymore - did I just destroy it?

[Anonymous]

Here's what happened:

I booted DBAN from CD, started autonuke. After a couple of seconds a white-on-black error message appeared at the top of the screen. Something ata1 timed out. I don't remeber the words.

After that the program just kept getting slower. I left it running the whole night and in the morning it was at about 30000 b/s, losing one 1 b/s every second or so.

NOW: I rebooted in knoppix, it finds /dev/sda (I have a SATA Drive, 250 GB) but it can't access it. Neither fdisk, cfdisk or badblocks do anything - they all quit with "can't read" errors.

Booted Win XP Install CD - it doesn't find the drive either.

The drive is still visible in the BIOS though.

What did I do? What can I do?

Thanks for your help!
Lorenz

 

[Anonymous]

I didn't... luckily

I changed the SATA mode in the BIOS from 'native' to 'compatible'. Now the drive is seen by both WinXP setup and linux (as /dev/hda).

In case anyone has ideas, why DBAN rendered the drive unusable in native SATA mode, I would love to hear them.

 

[Anonymous]

but DBAN is still really slow

I forgot: I tried running DBAN again. It, too, can see the compatible SATA drive, but this time it starts even slower than before and looses speed even faster. After one minute it was down to 5 MB/s.

I am using 'badblocks' under knoppix now, because I need to get done - the computer is already sold and the buyer probably doesn't want to wait another week.

 

[dajhorn]

Obtain a diagnostic program from the manufacturer and run it on this hard drive. The disk will probably report a SMART fault.