Boot Debian with a Damaged Drive Attached

[jakegon]

Hi All,

I have damaged drive that I want to clone using DDrescue. But my problem is if I attach the damaged drive in a SATA slot before booting Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu will fail to boot as it will keep on trying to mount the damaged drive. I found a way around this problem by editing Grub with this line libata.force=2.00:disable then Ubuntu will boot up fine but now I can't detect the drive anymore as the SATA slot is now disabled.

Question:

1. How do I boot Ubuntu while the damaged drive is attached to it?
2. If the first is not feasible, how do I force Ubuntu to detect a newly attached SATA drive without rebooting the system?

Thanks.

[S.Haran]

Connect the drive after you have Debian booted up. If it is not auto detected do a rescan / reset with...

echo "- - -" | sudo tee -a /sys/class/scsi_host/host1/scan <<<< change host1 as needed

[maximus]

A SATA drive should be able to be recognized in Ubuntu when attached after booting. However, it is a good idea to find the settings in Ubuntu to disable auto mounting of new drives. Even then it is no guarantee that Linux will not try to read some part of the drive that will cause it to lock up, in which case the drive will get listed as a device but will still not be accessible.