Re: [tlug] Possibility to recover a hard disk by swapping control board

[PF2K-WLKN@example.com (Keith Wilkinson)]

In my opinion the LiveCD that is 
most widely compatible and most 
user friendly is OpenSuSE 11.4 -- 
you can select a Japanese keyboard 
but English user interface language 
(keyboard is submenu of language), 
and you can select any of a zillion 
languages for both system & apps.  
You can look at "Hardware Info" 
inside YAST (control panel) to 
see if hardware is recognized. 
You can also format a drive for 
multiboot -- tagging certain 
partitions as NTFS or other OSes 
(can't do that in Fedora). 

Have you tried running TestDisk on 
Linux on a PC, not a Mac? Maybe TestDisk 
uses the BIOS to access the disk, and 
the Mac BIOS is surely different. 

If you have a PC with IDE but not 
SATA then one option would be a 
SATA card, however an external 
USB3/eSATA case costs less -- the 
Century CLS35EU3BF USB3.0+eSATA case 
is discounting to under 4,000 at 
Clevery in Akihabara. 
USB 2.0 plays nicely with USB 3.0 

On the subject of swapping controllers, 
I'd *guess* that a table to map out bad 
sectors is stored in flash memory on the 
controller board. If that is true, then 
swapping a controller board from another 
"identical" disk (with a different bad 
sector map) is likely to introduce new 
problems.