[Herts] Recovering a faulty drive

[Malcolm Smith]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 09:21:34PM +0100, Steve Clark wrote:
> It looks like my old harddrive may finally have died. The PC wouldn't boot
> and the drive is making some strange noises.

Yikes.


> Luckily I do have a backup from a couple of months ago and there's not
> much  in the way of essential data on it, but I'd like to recover some
> files if I can.

Well hopefully it's the boot partition or OS, and your data might be
still there.


> I've booted up the PC with an Ubuntu CD, but I'm not sure on the best way
> to proceed from there. I know Malc had something similar a while back. Any
> tips?

Obviously install another hard drive (power off the machine first! ;)
or plug in an external USB drive/stick to copy the data across to.

http://www.thesmith.org.uk/words/journal/2007-11.html#ddrescue

Use ddrescue, which is an awesome command like dd but for rescuing
data from a drive as it is in the process of dying. There are of
course many specialised Rescue disk LiveCDs.

Here's my saga:
http://www.thesmith.org.uk/words/journal/2007-11.html#diskcrash
http://www.thesmith.org.uk/words/journal/2007-12.html#morediskerrors

And another back in 2004:
http://www.thesmith.org.uk/words/journal/2004-06.html#diskcrash


Good luck
-- 
Malcolm
http://www.thesmith.org.uk/     Personal site of unfathomable depths
http://www.secretbass.org.uk/   Drum circle in deepest Hertfordshire
http://www.drummingisfun.co.uk/ African drumming workshops+performances