Hack in progress: HP Laptop HDD to USB enclosure

I’ve recently written off my HP ZE5375US laptop and sold on various parts online. One thing I did keep however is the 40G 2.5″ hard drive in the hopes of using it with a cheap USB HDD enclosure. “Yay” I thought, “I’ll have portable storage for all my research notes and results, not to mention be able to run around with several television series on it if I’m so inclined”.

All was not well however. I plug the usb drive enclosure with the 40G drive into my machine. The windows does its detecting new hardware thing and things seem to be going well, but the drive doesn’t show up. I go to My Computer -> Manage to try and partition and format it but it doesn’t show up… not good – but I wasn’t too concerned since it was windows and that means it can be erratic and stupid. Next stop Linux!

So I rebooted and tried mounting it in Debian:

Crap. Lets see what the kernel says:

Also not good. I/O errors from Africa. Kinda interested to see just what information we can read about the drive using scsitools:

Urk. This results in the command prompt screwing up due to all these unprintable characters. Obviously from all the zeros, not much information is coming through.

I then went back into windows to try out a whole lot of HDD testing tools. And most picked up the physical device being present with the correct size, but any accessing of data didn’t work and writing a new partition table didn’t either. I would assume this meant the drive was now crap, although the storage time (mostly within the laptop case) may have something to do with it… still, that was only about 6 months.

I also thought the enclosure might not be right. So I performed surgery on my old brick laptop (486 dx100) and extracted its 320M hdd – hooked it to the usb enclosure and wolah! It works. But 320M is barely worth having when my mp3 player is 5G – plus I like having this old laptop around – with linux on it runs fast enough for command line work.

So more googling for me:
Looks like I’m not the only one with trouble
Uh oh Slashdot report on HP and Compaq drive locking, maybe this is my problem?
Sounds like it from what this guy says.

So I’m about to give up, or maybe buy an IDE adaptor for the drive (since doing this over USB limits the information I can find out), but also there is stuff on unlocking drives around… maybe I’ll look into that.

Any body with any hints please let me know!

I've recently written off my HP ZE5375US laptop and sold on various parts online. One thing I did keep however is the 40G 2.5" hard drive in the hopes of using it with a cheap USB HDD enclosure. "Yay" I thought, "I'll have portable storage for all my research notes and results, not to mention be able to run around with several television series on it if I'm so inclined". All was not well however. I plug the usb drive enclosure with the 40G drive into my machine. The windows does its detecting new hardware thing and things seem to be going well, but the drive doesn't show up. I go to My Computer -> Manage to try and partition and format it but it doesn't show up... not good - but I wasn't too concerned since it was windows and that means it can be erratic and stupid. Next stop Linux! So I rebooted and tried mounting it in Debian: $ mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usb/ mount: /dev/sda: can't read superblock Crap. Lets see what the kernel says: kernel: usb 5-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8 kernel: scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices usb.agent[22559]: usb-storage: already loaded Vendor: C25 040 Model: T S04-0 Rev: A4O Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00 kernel: SCSI device sda: 78123776 512-byte hdwr sectors (39999 MB) kernel: SCSI device sda: 78123776 512-byte hdwr sectors (39999 MB) kernel: sda: usb-storage: queuecommand called kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0 kernel: unable to read partition table kernel: Attached scsi disk sda at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 scsi.agent[22599]: sd_mod: can't be loaded (for disk) kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0 last message repeated 5 times kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 78123648 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 78123648 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0 Also not good. I/O errors from Africa. Kinda interested to see just what information we can read about the drive using scsitools: $ scsiinfo -i /dev/sda Inquiry command --------------- Relative Address 0 Wide bus 32 0 Wide bus 16 0 Synchronous neg. 0 Linked Commands 0 Command Queueing 0 SftRe 0 Device Type 0 Peripheral Qualifier 0 Removable? 0 Device Type Modifier 0 ISO Version 0 ECMA Version 0 ANSI Version 0 AENC 0 TrmIOP 0 Response Data Format 1 Vendor: C25040 then some (^*(&^(*&^(* -> unprintable characters Urk. This results in the command prompt screwing up due to all these unprintable characters. Obviously from all the zeros, not much information is coming through. I then went back into windows to try out a whole lot of HDD testing tools. And most picked up the physical device being present with the correct size, but any accessing of data didn't work and writing a new partition table didn't either. I would assume this meant the drive was now crap, although the storage time (mostly within the laptop case) may have something to do with it... still, that was only about 6 months. I also thought the enclosure might not be right. So I performed surgery on my old brick laptop (486 dx100) and extracted its 320M hdd - hooked it to the usb enclosure and wolah! It works. But 320M is barely worth having when my mp3 player is 5G - plus I like having this old laptop around - with linux on it runs fast enough for command line work. So more googling for me: Looks like I'm not the only one with trouble Uh oh Slashdot report on HP and Compaq drive locking, maybe this is my problem? Sounds like it from what this guy says. So I'm about to give up, or maybe buy an IDE adaptor for the drive (since doing this over USB limits the information I can find out), but also there is stuff on unlocking drives around... maybe I'll look into that. Any body with any hints please let me know!