[HD failure]

[Matt Graham]

Mark Szidik <szidikm@mlcnet.org> wrote:
> 
> I have a person with a failed HD that needs some data recovered
> from it.  There is a guy named Skip in the OS/2 users group who
> does this.  Anybody know how I can reach him?

If this is not a mechanical failure, but semi-corrupt filesystem data, you can
probably get a look at the disk using Tom's RootBoot as long as they used FAT
or ext2.  The Linuxcare BBC should work too (and it has fscking tools for DOS,
as well as NTFS read support IIRC.)

If the mechanical failure is just a few bad sectors and not grinding noises
coming from the drive, you can get reasonable results by using dd_rescue
(standard with SuSE, not in Redhat and Mandrake for some silly reason but it's
easily downloaded and compiled) to copy everything on the drive to another
drive, then run gpart to try and fix the partition table, then run fsck on the
partitions.

Been there, done that with a broken SCSI drive, and recovered 98% of the data.
 FAT partitions may have all kinds of weird things on them that dosfsck can't
handle properly (swap file, etcetera) so SCANDISK.EXE would be a better bet if
this is FAT.

If the disk is HPFS, forget everything I said.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
"I backed up my brain to tape, but tar says the tape contains no data...."