hard drive recover operation

[David Fletcher]

At 23:32 19/09/2006, you wrote:

>Greetings,
>
>Last week I lost a hdd (bad blocks, I/O error no. 1117, I 
>think)...It was my main hdd, with a FC5 installation on it

I've never had this situation. I did once have a hard drive that 
completely died on me (I think the error message was something like 
"General failure reading drive C") but I'd backed up my data the week before.

But the general rule I believe is DON'T DO ANYTHING that might change 
the contents of the faulty drive. You will probably end up making it worse.

The thing to do is take an image of the partition if you can. Perhaps 
dd can do this for you. There is a noerror option to make it continue 
after read errors. Then make a backup copy of the image. Then work 
with the image. That's what police forensics do.

Back on 3rd May there was a thread called "Undelete Compat Flash?" 
that mentioned a couple of forensic analysis type applications 
regarding extraction of photographs from a reformatted flash card. 
One of them was called "scalpel". Maybe something from there might help?

Good luck.

Dave F