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I have an old (2007) Dell Precision Workstation 690 with Ubuntu 12.04. It has 2 mirrored 139G SAS drives for OS and 2 WD Black 2TB data drives that were formatted ext4 and rsynced and had my virtual machines on them. We had an extended power outage and my UPS died, unfortunately without cable connected between UPS and computer.

When the system came back up, the Dell BIOS did not see the 2 WD drives, and of course Ubuntu did not see them either. I find it very odd that both SATA drives died simultaneously when the SAS drives had no issue at all.

I have a more modern Fedora 20 system with Award bios that sees the drives but with 0 size. I assume a blown partition table, but Fedora does not see the drives at all. fdisk.ext4, ext2fdisk and fdisk all fail to list the drives. Western Digital's drive repair, GParted Live and everything else I have tried do not even see the drives. They spin up fine and do not make any clicks or weird noises.

When connected via Sabrent SATA -> USB adapter to Win7-64 windows says they need to be formatted before I can use them.

I'm out of ideas except paying a small fortune sending the drives off to a data recovery shop. Can anyone help save me a fortune?

jerryrig
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  • " the Dell BIOS did not see the 2 WD drives": please add details. The optimum would be the addition of the whole "dmesg" output caught right after a fresh boot, with both SATA drives connected. Also, please tell us, exactly where they were connected (common/standalone SATA controller vs SATA RAID controller). – Damiano Verzulli Aug 13 '15 at 19:24
  • "a more modern Fedora 20 system with Award bios that sees the drives but with 0 size. I assume a blown partition table": unfortunately the BIOS does not " check/analyze" the structure of the disk. It simply asks the HD electronics. So if the BIOS say "size 0", that commonly means a serious problem with HD board. Sometimes (not always) I had been lucky in replacing the board with exactly another one (very same model) and getting back data. – Damiano Verzulli Aug 13 '15 at 19:30
  • Thanks, Damiano. I would have tried replacing the board, as I have extra WD Black 2 TB drives. All the other ones are WD2003FYYS with typical star screws, the failed drives are WD2000FYYZ and the screws holding the board onto the drive are more like rivets and seem unremovable. – jerryrig Aug 14 '15 at 20:01

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