Drive dead?

[monnier]

My almost-brand-new WL-700gE is not answering any more and the drive isn't spinning up any more.
I had installed OpenWRT on it and at some point while I was copying a lot of files from an external USB drive to the internal IDE drive the unit just froze. Since then, the drive hasn't spun up and the only signs of life I've gotten from it is that I'm able to TFTP a new firmware on it and I occasionally get to see OpenWRT's boot-up packet to port 4919, but after that nothing. Doesn't reply to `ping' (other than while waiting for the TFTP transfer that is), just stis there with the "lan1", "ready", and "power" leds ON and all others OFF.
Do you guys have a suggestion about what I could do to try and diagnose/fix the problem? I'd be happy to take out the drive see if it works elsewhere, or replace it with another, except that if the drive or the machine itself is "dead", I'd rather be able to send it in for repair under warranty.

[Hacksaw]

Wow - I away from home for a week and came home to find my router in a weird state. No shares were available and Internet was down. I tried to log in to the router but telnet was not available, the admin password was back to the default, and only a few of the web pages worked. I rebooted the router and now it is the same state as yours. Obviously it is HDD related, and although it is still under warranty, I pulled the HDD out anyway to try and recover all the photos (and other stuff) I have on the drive (it was completely full when I left - I hope that didn't cause the problem).

I put the drive in a USB enclosure and connected it to my PC so I could try and mount it using openSUSE under vmware. No partitions are recognized and I can't force it to mount as it seems the partition table is missing.

I am going to spend some time trying to recover as much data as possible, but I was wondering if anyone has ever successfully recovered the drive after this has happened?

Thanks,
Hacksaw.

[monnier]

[ No thanks for hijacking my thread. ]

I rebooted the router and now it is the same state as yours.

You mean the drive doesn't even spin up (otherwise, it's clearly a different problem from mine).

Obviously it is HDD related, and although it is still under warranty, I pulled the HDD out anyway to try and recover all the photos (and other stuff) I have on the drive (it was completely full when I left - I hope that didn't cause the problem).
I put the drive in a USB enclosure and connected it to my PC so I could try and mount it using openSUSE under vmware. No partitions are recognized and I can't force it to mount as it seems the partition table is missing.

So it *is* spinning, at least when you put it in the enclosure.

I am going to spend some time trying to recover as much data as possible, but I was wondering if anyone has ever successfully recovered the drive after this has happened?

If you use the ASUS firmware (or a Custom version of it), it's completely normal for the drive not to have a normal partition table. Basically the drive's first X MB are used for the "on-disk firmware" (the *.nas file), and then comes the partition table (IIRC).

[mumsoft]

I put the drive in a USB enclosure and connected it to my PC so I could try and mount it using openSUSE under vmware. No partitions are recognized and I can't force it to mount as it seems the partition table is missing.

Did you have a look at this post of mine:
http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=10198

That should help.
Marc