IBM Hard drives

[janet loves bill]

Hi, for the 3rd time, I have tried to install Debian(woody), and for the 3rd time the installer hosed the whole setup. BUT this time the ext3 file system got corrupted, and essentially disabled the whole H/D, or so I thought. I put in Partition Magic boot disks and tried to reformat partition for ext2 and no go, drive not readable or accessible! So I put in windows boot disk to access DOS and fdisk could not fix problem either ....So I went to IBM web site and d/l some tools from driver/support page, and made boot disk as suggested and lo and behold I was able to fix the problem, this is a New 40 gig drive, and now works perfectly!!
So I strongly suggest that anyone go the the web site of their H/D mfg and get any offered tools to fix their drives just in case the filesystems get corrupted/mangled.

[dunbar]

I'll second the concept that hard disk manufacturers offer excellent tools. I recovered a 5 gig from the trash can, it is now a 4.83 gig but no longer has massive errors, and formats without difficulty as an ext3 disk. These tools work well especially considering the price.

[Can O' Beans]

I would agree. Most common hard drive "failures" & "bad" drives can actually be fixed with the utilities - both on brand new drives and used drives.

I keep the IBM utilities handy on a dos boot disk since I have 3 of the infamous "bad" IBM drive models that I need to low level format now & then.