[Sussex] Anybody out there any good at rescuing hard drives?

[Dominic Humphries]

Evening all,

my SATA hard drive has died :(

The basic sequence of events was:

   Tried to mount IDE disk: "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt"

   xterm locked up

   Killed xterm

   started new xterm

   PC locked up

   Rebooted PC

   Nothing works

That pretty much sums it up.

"fdisk -l" isn't very optimistic:

   Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
   255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
   Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1        9729    78148161   83  Linux

   Disk /dev/hdb: 6510 MB, 6510551040 bytes
   15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 13456 cylinders
   Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 483840 bytes

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hdb1   *           1       13456     6357928+  83  Linux

   Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
   255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
   Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table

And fsck doesn't help either

   fsck 1.38-WIP (09-May-2005)
   e2fsck 1.38-WIP (09-May-2005)
   Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
   fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda

   The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
   filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
   filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
   is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
       e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

There should be half a dozen ext3 partitions found on this disk. I do have some
backups, but they're quite old and I'd be much happier if I could recover the
data off my hard drive. But right now, all I have is Knoppix.

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Dominic