Recovering goofed hard drive

[hellrazor]

I'm undecided whether this belongs here or in the hardware section, so whatever...

There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for this treachery.

Long story short I had to use a busted SATA cable due to A) very important, time-critical reasons, and B) I didn't have another, and I had to hard shutdown because it got disconnected (due to busted cable), this morning I got a new cable and now fuck's shitted up.

EDIT: The drive is a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm ST31000523AS.

At boot I'm lucky if BIOS will see it, and I can't boot from it, and if I try to do anything (fsck, etc.) usually spits out

Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda3
Could this be a zero-length partition?

However, mke2fs can (apprently) see things:

mint@mint ~/Desktop $ sudo mke2fs /dev/sda
mke2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
/dev/sda is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
61054976 inodes, 244190646 blocks
12209532 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
7453 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
	4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
	102400000, 214990848

I've tried to use various things using a backup superblock, but that usually fails with

dumpe2fs: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

Also of note is that the kernel log is downright littered with

Apr 16 21:26:31 mint kernel: [   51.669184] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1953524992
Apr 16 21:26:31 mint kernel: [   51.669188] Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 244190624
Apr 16 21:26:31 mint kernel: [   51.669807] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
Apr 16 21:26:31 mint kernel: [   51.669811] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda]  Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
Apr 16 21:26:31 mint kernel: [   51.669816] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 74 70 6d a0 00 00 08 00

But apparently it's able to do enough to tell what partitions it has:

mint@mint ~/Desktop $ sudo ls -l /dev/sda*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Apr 16 22:16 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 Apr 16 21:33 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 Apr 16 21:27 /dev/sda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 3 Apr 16 21:54 /dev/sda3
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 4 Apr 16 21:27 /dev/sda4

And I'm looking for help.

 

[Aquinus]

Are you certain the drive itself is good?

sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

 

[hellrazor]

If I'm really (really, really) fucking fast I can get fsck.ext4 -b 32768 -B 4096 /dev/sda3 to tell me that all the groups are messed up and it gets to about 20% fixing inodes before it starts throwing short read/writes at me. Also, if I run gparted first thing when partedmagic boots it'll tell me all the partitions, but once I refresh the devices it'll disappear, and if I run anything after it it'll start throwing short read/writes again.

I'll try smartmontools in a little bit.

EDIT:

sudo smartctl -a -T verypermissive /dev/sda
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-23-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

Vendor:               /2:0:0:0
Product:              
User Capacity:        600,332,565,813,390,450 bytes [600 PB]
Logical block size:   774843950 bytes
>> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page

Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging

 

[hellrazor]

Right now it's really looking like a mechanical failure of some kind, and I figure that I'm going to need a clean room and a new drive to make any progress... so fuck.

 

[revin]

If you relly need something off that drive fridge it rice, and start getting what you can
I've actually froze a drive 4-5 times and was able to get the stuff off, BUT I got a new drive/install to have a pc ready to transfer to.
Getdatback has saved my ass toooo many times
Good luck