[nylug-talk] Dead hard drive

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Hi list,

A friend wanted me to rescue some files off a dead hard drive.  Mostly a
bunch of jpgs.

He said that there was a Windows based program that allowed him to see the
filenames, but unfortunately, not rescue the files unless the full version
of the program was purchased.

I offered to help him out, but am finding that I'm having a lot of
difficulty.

After booting my computer with this (PATA) drive hooked up, I found that
none of the partitions were mountable.  The drive produces the infamouse
"Drive seek" errors.

I tried using dd_rescue to read the raw partitions (/dev/hdd[1-4]) and got
I/O errors.  Nothing.

I tried using dd_rescue to read the drive device (/dev/hdd) and it started
to read the drive, however, I stopped it since my concern is that if the
drive died due to a hard crash, whatever caused that crash may be doing more
damage as the platters spin.  Perhaps that's even why that Windows program
saw filenames and I can't with Linux.

Does NYLUG have installfests where I can take this drive and perhaps have
another person look at it to give me a 2nd opinion?  I want to tell my
friend the drive is toast, and if the Windows program works, buy it and use
it.  But I'd like to get a 2nd opinion before I admit I couldn't do
something with Linux that he could do with Windows.  Rubs me the wrong
way.

Thanks,
Pete