Further information based on the helpful responses:
- Yes, the drive is spinning. FWIW, it sounds normal too.
- There were no discs, floppies, or usb drives connected
- I have disconnected and reconnected the drive...no dice. It's now
been installed in an external case (it came from an HTPC, which I
wanted to get back up and running for the end of the World Series last
night), which is where the log errors came from.
- I did not do anything to press the bios to look for the drive - it
just wasn't listed.
Things don't sound promising, I guess.
Cheers.
2008/10/29 C.T. Paterson <i [ dot ] adore [ dot ] my [ dot ] 64 [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>:
> Good day, folks,
>
> When power was lost last night, I happened to be awake, and heard the
> siren calls of my UPSes. I dutifully went about the house, shutting
> down my PCs...and for reasons I'll spare you, I shut one down by
> pressing a soft-reset button on the case. This, as far as I know,
> brings the computer down in a controlled fashion.
>
> Upon resumption of power, when I booted up my machine, it did not
> boot...and some experimentation narrowed suspicion down to the hard
> drive. I'd like to know if (a) anyone can direct me on how to recover
> the data (key stuff is backed up elsewhere), and (b) whether the drive
> itself can be rescued (ie. is there a chance this is a filesystem
> problem rather than the hardware itself).
>
> I rather suspect answers to both are "No", but you folks tend to be
> smarter than I.
>
> Things I have discovered:
>
> 1. The bios does not see the drive when internally installed in its
> home machine.
>
> 2. When I opt to watch the POST, I see it get to "GRUB", but it stops
> there. I'm having some difficulty reconciling this with point 1.
>
> 3. I have installed the drive into a external-USB case, and currently
> have it connected to my laptop. A tail of the syslog reveals the
> following (more after the log)...
>
> [snip]
>
> 4. Monitoring the /dev directory, I saw /dev/sdb pop up briefly before
> disappearing.
>
> 5. Still watching the syslog, I no longer see messages as above. Now
> it's just...
>
> [snip]
>
>
> Any advice or commiseration is welcome.
>
> Cheers.
>
> --
> "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
> -- Thomas Paine
>
--
"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
-- Thomas Paine