[nylug-talk] Dead hard drive

[Peter C. Norton]

Pete,

You'll often hear when a hard drive has had a head crash and is
scraping the platters.

If I was in your place, and I am *not* an expert on data recovery, I
would want to clear space somewhere, chill the disk, and use dd_rescue
to get the data off to an image of the disk. If I couldn't get a good
copy of the partition table, I'd want to use gnu parted to try to find
the offsets within the resulting drive image that constituted the
actual files, and then use the offset option to losetup or mount to
just mount the needed partitions.

If that wasn't working, then I'd recommend using something like this
directly on the image file: 

http://foremost.sourceforge.net/

Though I haven't used this particular tool.  I actually can't remember
the particular tool that I did use to recover some erased jpegs from a
SD card a few months back.

-Peter

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 07:18:07PM -0400, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 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
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