I/O error

[wobbles]

is there any way to get passed an I/O error on a Laptop hard drive. i have a device that i can connect a Laptop hard drive to a usb cable when i plug it into my machine i can see it but when i go to go into it it comes up with I/O error.. is there any possible way i can get by this or is the hard drive shot. i realy need to get into the hard drive. also what causes this error. ??

[Ferrit]

I would look at the usb device you plug the laptop harddrive into as the possible culprit for the problem. Dont immediately assume tis the harddrive till you connect it direct to an ide cable with an adapter. Alot of the logic boards in those usb connectors are not that good.

[NooNoo]

Some of those adapters are not "one way fit" and it's possible to put the cable in the wrong way round and damage the drive.

As ferrit says, you need to attach the hard drive to a desktop.

I/O error is Input/Output error. There is something wrong with reading from or writing to the drive. This can be caused by the cable, the connection or the drive itself.

[wobbles]

ok yes thank you for the definition of I/O Error but i knew that already. i did put the drive on 5 other machines (3 desktops and 2 laptops) laptops not thru USB and it all came up with the same thing. but someone before me took the hard drive and placed it on a usb cable as well as placing it into another laptop. and they got a reading of -1. now that i dont know what means? can anyone help me on that meaning??

thanks

[NooNoo]

Was the -1 an error code? If so, did you mean 0x1 ? What gave the error? Bios or Windows or Linux or some disk utility? If you meant -1 this is often seen as a scapegoat error - there isn't an appropriate one and it falls into the "I don't know what to call this error" area.

[wobbles]

i dont know what the -1 error was at the time cause i was not the one that got it it was the person before me. i believe it was winXP over all i still cant get into the drive to get any information off it. does anyone know a way i can get into the drive if it is comming up with that I/O error. this will be if the adapter and cable thing doesn't work.

thanks.

[CCT]

You need to get at the info BUT someone already tried ('the person before me') and failed and they got an error ('-1').

So, this someone tried to help you or are you with the DEA and trying to crack a drive or what?

[wobbles]

i am not with the DEA, the person that owns the laptop took it to someone to look at and that someone got the -1 code. yes it was a error code. i personaly never heard of an -1 error code. so the person that owns the laptop took it back and gave it to me to work on. they told me that they took it to someone else and they said it came up with an error code of -1 when they tryed to retrieve any data from the drive. is there a nother way to retrieve any data from this drive. i did notice that NooNoo said that the -1 error means it is a BS error and that they didn't even want to continue. I dont know just trying to understand all these error codes.

[NooNoo]

I didn't say it was a BS error code. I said it was an error that is produced when there is an error, but no specific error condition. It really is up to the programmer as to how and why any error is fulfilled.

The drive needs specialist recovery.

[CCT]

Well, I did a LOT of searching around and there is a paucity of info re I/O errors in general and that error (-1) in particiular.

I actually found a couple places mentioning stuff like encrypted drives with those symptoms but they had no fix either.

Sorry!

[wobbles]

oh ok

thanks!!

[Platypus]

I agree with the advice given. Using the drive in several different configurations has eliminated external causes (IDE controllers, IDE cables & adaptor), leaving the drive itself as the source of the errors. This in turn comes down to just a few subsystems - the control PCB on the underside of the drive, the interconnects from this to the drive internals, and the head/platter assembly.

Most I/O serious errors come down to failure of the magnetic substrate on the platter(s), which is terminal, due to the very high cost and low success rate of recovery attempts. If the control PCB has developed a fault, it can be possible to recover the drive contents by temporarily fitting the PCB from an identical drive. In rare instances, a corrosion spot can occur in the contact where one of the flat cables connects to the control PCB - gently removing & re-inserting the flat cables can clean the contact & restore the connection. Also rare is a fracture internally in one of the flat cables (usually the one to the read/write head because of the flexing), and again this is effectively terminal, due to the high cost of correcting the fault.

Depending on how severe the error is, the drive manufacturer's diagnostic software may be able to test the drive and indicate the type of error that is occurring. Most manufacturers have diagnostics downloadable from their websites.

The cause behind the -1 error being a catch-all and not having any definition is that it is the result of using a signed integer value to indicate a Boolean NOT relationship.

A successful I/O operation will return an error value of 0, zero being the Boolean false condition: "error occurred" = false

Hence it's not necessary to have any specific knowledge of the error codes given by a device in order to check if its operation is error-free. Just check for a non-zero error flag. You don't check for zero because = 0 is a mathematical expression to a computer and will be passed off to the integer unit for calculation, NOT 0 is Boolean logic and will be done in the CPU registers, much faster. And speed is what you want during an I/O transaction.

But if NOT 0 is true (ie there is an error), the NOT operator inverts (sets true) all the bits. If the computer then displays this to you as a mathematical value using the default signed integer type, the result is -1. The only thing it can mean is "there was an error".