<div class="gmail_quote">On 3 July 2010 23:05, Mike - XP Computers <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@xpcomputers.co.uk">mike@xpcomputers.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Presumably you are assuming it is hardware failure? (rather than
straight data corruption / file system damage?).</span>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br>The clicking noises the drive is making make me think it's hardware. The drive is about 5 years old, so not too surprising.<span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> <br>
</span></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="EN-GB"><div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Can you see anything when you try to read the file system
with a boot cd? Can a disk manager see the drive at all? What about the BIOS? Depending
on what can and can’t see the drive, will depend where to focus the
effort.</span></p></div></div></blockquote><div>I need to do some more tests. When I tried the boot CD (took ages to start up) I tried mounting partitions. Could get one of them, but it was struggling to even show a file list. I'm going to get hold of another drive and try to copy stuff with something like ddrescue. <br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="EN-GB"><div><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">I’d personally want to try the drive as a slave in another
working computer system, rather than working from a boot CD (if possible), but
sometimes a boot CD is the best way.</span></div></div></blockquote><div><br>As I didn't have another drive to hand I thought I'd try a boot CD. I'm probably going to buy a new 500GB SATA drive. Having managed with 250GB for ages I don't anticipate needing more for a while.<br>
<br>Overall it's not a disaster. We don't have much in the way of critical files and all the old stuff is backed up on a USB drive. I also found I had a backup of my documents from 2 weeks ago on Ubuntu One. I had been using that regularly, but it had stopped working on Kubuntu recently. What I may have lost are some recent holiday pictures, but the best ones are on the Picasa site, so I can get them back. <br>
<br>There are obviously lessons to be learnt about doing proper backups. I should put old stuff on DVDs or a USB drive and store it somewhere else in case of disasters at home. I may look at storing more stuff on-line. Ubuntu One and Dropbox both offer 2GB for free, but then the price goes up sharply for extra space. Google's storage is cheaper, but I don't think there are tools to sync things. Google/Picasa may be worth using for photos, but the slow upload speed makes it a bit time consuming.<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div link="blue" vlink="purple" lang="EN-GB"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Hope this gives you some pointers</span></p>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br>Thanks guys. I'll let you know how I get on.<br><br>-- <br>Steve <br></div></div>