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

[Dave Chapman]

On Sunday 05 February 2006 17:40, Dominic Humphries wrote:
> 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

Does the disc make any noise.
If it is ticking it's the head stuck.
Try shaking it. As a last resort take the lid off and move the arm  with some 
thing. A pen would do.
As I say that's a last resort.

Dave