[dundee] Hard Drive recovery

[James Le Cuirot]

On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:50:40 +0000 (GMT)
Lee Hughes <toxicnaan at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> what's you choice of free linux recovery tools?

I'm going to get skinned alive for saying this but...

A few months ago, a friend of mine sent a hard drive to me in the post.
The poor fool figured it seemed solid enough so he hardly padded it at
all. When it came through the letter box and landed on my wooden floor
with a loud thud, I knew this was unlikely to have a happy ending. If
only it had been a solid state drive!

I tried to get some life out of it in Linux but it would only get as
far as reading the partition table. Mounting the thing just kept making
it reset itself and it was making some horrible clicking noises.

I wrote it off as a loss but my unwashed Windows friend offered to give
it a try. I thought he was going to try and swap in some spare parts
but he didn't even need to. He had little trouble reading it in
Windows, and was even able to access the ReiserFS partition!

I was consequently able to restore my web forum to its former glory.
Who'd have thought it, eh?

James