On an older computer, a harddrive is broken. In the BIOS, for that HD, it can still show the size (it shows "200.1 GB"), but it can NOT auto-detect the number of cylinders etc... anymore (it displays empty fields under those, while for the other HD it displays the numbers and it detects these when pressing "enter"). Which part of the HD could be broken to give the above behaviour in the BIOS?

I believe the information for auto detect is stored along with drives firmware on the controller board. Hasn't LBA has pretty much replaced CHS?

GRUB says "error 15" when booting. I used a bootable rescue CDRom and the following turns out:

On this HD, the partition table is suddenly corrupted. Two partitions are still visible, others are not visible by some partition manager programs, but are visible by some others (and those give a warning about some logical partition without .... at sector ....).

I think the HD is corrupting itself because before this happened I already saw some files with garbled names on it. So I think it can go to the dump.

It's a shame, it contained an installation of ArchLinux that was the latest possible version that supported an old geforce 3 video card on that old computer and had KDE 3.5, it's impossible to create that installation again now that the Archlinux servers all only have the newest versions of packages :(

[Edited by - Lode on July 27, 2009 2:37:14 AM]