arctic Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 hi everyone. i have an old hdd (4gb) which is only slightly alive. it used to be in a windows box, but i put it in a linux box (windows alsways froze completely) in order to retrieve some data of that drive that wasn't stored on a cd yet. so i need some help/suggestions, if possible. description: the samsung hdd was stalling when the windows system booted and hang at some point. there were some "clacking" noises on the hdd. i took the hdd out of the windows box and put in in a linux box and manually mounted it. but when i try to access the drive, it sometimes freezes the whole system, depending on which folders i want to access. i have removed the hdd from the box again and put it on ice in order to conserve it temporarily. but i would like to copy some of the folders onto another drive for burning the stuff on cd. but as a direct access of certain folders creates hickups, followed by a system freeze, i am not sure what would be the best approach to saving the data, if possible. if it is plain impoissible to save the drive, please say so. thank you for any hints/tips/tricks in advance. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 (edited) I see you tried it in another computer that already had a working windows or Linux in it which should have been able to read your troubled drive if it still has not totally failed. Since you cannot do this then try using a live-cd such as knoppix or PCLinuxOS or such like. If the live cd cannot read it then the Hard drive has probably died. If the data is especially precious then you may need to get the services of a data recovery company. Cheers. John. Edited July 27, 2005 by AussieJohn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowe Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 I think this just proves how important it is to backup our files, saves a lot of headaches later on. DVD's are so cheap these days, anyway. Good luck getting your data back. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 Were I to do something similar, here is how I would do: - First, I would use: dd conv=noerror if=/dev/hdd of=/home/arctic/hdd.img - Then I would install a virtual PC, and boot it with any Linux you want, and have this hdd.img file mounted as one of the virtual PC's drives. - Finally, I'd try and get as much data as I can, with no fear of countless freezes since it is a virtual machine. Good luck. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 If I am reading your message correctly, you have already tried the "freezer trick" wherin the drive's temperature is reduced prior to use in a last attempt to salvage data. This is the only trick that I am aware of when dealing with dying drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 27, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 thanks for the info everyone. will try your approach, yves, but i doubt that it will work... and yeah, i am pessimistic. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 Virtual PC. Isn´t that just another name for a live-cd or vice-versa ???. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted July 27, 2005 Report Share Posted July 27, 2005 (edited) I had a drive behave similarly recently. It would lock up WinXP on boot-up but could be mounted in linux, though it would hang when trying to access certain directories. Mine was a partition table corruption. Though you may not be able to recover the data from those directories where it's hanging, the drive itself may not be dead. After a low-level format, an fdisk, and a re-format, the drive might be usable again. It worked for me, and the drive has been trouble-free since. YMMV. Good luck with it. Edit: I had not saved the partition table on this drive, so I couldn't try restoring it, and qtparted and fdisk were not able to fix it (even though I had an fdisk -l printout). If you've saved yours and you suspect that a bad partition table could be part or all of the problem, you might try restoring it. Edited July 28, 2005 by jboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 The freezer trick mostly suffices for old dying drives- however, if it didn't work for you and you really want the data on the old drive you could try a (commercial) program named HDD Regenerator. It treats whole drives (not partitions) as physical entities, and most of the times it's able to fix bad clusters. Only you can tell if it's worth its money, though... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 oops... the drive completely died while copying some data five minutes ago. it was spinning and spinning, then abruptly stopped spinning while mounted with the virtual pc approach. a reboot showed in bios that the drives does not give a sign of life anymore. no power, no spinning, no led blinking. so be it... r.i.p. problem got sort of solved by itself. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 A virtual PC is a "software hardware" that runs inside your OS as any standard application. Here are those I know: - free: Qemu, Bochs, DosBox, Plex86, Xen - com.: VWWare, Win4Lin. On the matter of the hard disk partition table, note that it is possible to restore it without having made a copy, because such copies are already present at several offsets on the disk itself. Too bad I don't find the URL... it works with dd. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Oh, I was too late then anyway... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 On the matter of the hard disk partition table, note that it is possible to restore it without having made a copy, because such copies are already present at several offsets on the disk itself. Too bad I don't find the URL... it works with dd. Yves, thanks for that tip. I want to put that in my rescue folder for future reference, so I did a quick search and found the following: GPart: http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/ Partition Rescue HowTo: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWT...ion-Rescue.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Wouldn´t using a live-cd enable you to rescue data also on a drive which hadn´t totally failed, without the complications of these other methods which existed only because live-cds had not been developed/invented yet ???. I believe the answer is yes but the term vitual pc sounds more technical and therefore seemingly more important..............again the geek thing. I am here talking about rescuing data not trying to rescue or resurrect a failing drive. A week ago, I read an excellent article on the web in which a poster gave a detailed run through of how he rescued data from a Windows user friends failing hard drive and he did it entirely using knoppix. I look for easy solutions but for some only difficult and geekish solutions seem to count. Sorry your drive failed, it can now rest in piece (?). Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 you are right, john. a virtual pc is very similar to working with a live cd but there is a reason why i tried the virtual pc approach: i had thrown away my kanotix and knoppix live-cds two weeks ago as they were very very outdated. and - shame on me - i was too lazy to download the latest knoppix since then. stupid me! :D basically, i always prefer the simple approach to the "g33k" way of doing things. but without a live cd.... errm... *cough cough* ps: i am currently downloading a new knoppix and dsl version in case i run into such a problem again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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