[Nottingham] Computer woes

[Alex Walker]

I think having me as an owner has finally got to my computers and now they're 
deciding to commit suicide rather than go on living with me... and I thought 
I was such a loving owner!

First a motherboard died, then my CDRW drive stopped working, then an IDE 
cable broke (did you know they pull apart rather easily?) and now finally a 
hard disk went caput.  OK, so it's not a lot really, but hey, still annoys me 
cos I can't afford to replace them.

Anyway, the latest one is the most annoying, since I have a load of really 
useful data on it (like all my letters ever written and all my accounts 
details which I need for my self-assessment next April and various other 
things, including a 3500-song collection of Oggs - although they are 
retrievable since I own them all on CD.

So what I'm asking is - does anyone know of methods to get data off a dead HD?  
I guess first you want to know what I mean by "dead" don't you?

Well, booting in Linux I get:
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
hdd: IC35L040AVER07-0, ATA DISK drive
hdd: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=79780/16/63, UDMA(100)

So all seems well until:
hdd: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=45097371, sector=2621448
end_request: I/O error, cmd 0 dev 16:4b (hdd), sector 2621448

and it just says that lots and refuses to boot. Whilst doing this, the hard 
disk makes strange noises, which I can't really describe, but not like 
initialising or normal reading.  (Do I remember correctly that somewhere 
there is a collection of sound files of differently dead hard disks?)

Booting from a CD has the same effect and Windoze freezes on boot up with it 
in.  One thing is that this is just a data disk, so I haven't lost any OS 
stuff... but that's more replacable than the data.

Anyone got any bright ideas as to what I might try?

Hope you all enjoyed The Matrix Reloaded... not that I'm entering into the 
debate on that!

Any helpful help appreciated, cheers, 
Alex

-- 
http://www.x3ja.co.uk/