Am 02. Apr, 2007 schwätzte Lynn Newton so:

moin moin Lynn,

> Has anyone ever had to use a hard drive data recovery service here in town?
> Any recommendations on that?
>
> I am looking at the very real possibility of catastrophic data loss. Over the
> weekend I attempted to install a PCI USB card on my system because the
> built-in bus apparently went belly up several months ago, meaning that
> I've also been unable to do backups to my external drive all that time.
>
> When I installed the card, it at first gave me a DISK BOOT FAILURE from
> the BIOS.

Have you removed the new PCI card? It could be that the USB card is now
reserving hda/sda. You might be able to adjust that in the BIOS as well.

You could also try booting from a live or rescue CD.

I would reiterate what others said and suggest getting the drive to
another box, but not booting from it.

To that end I recommend keeping lots of types of converters on hand.

For instance, http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=CBL.

You should arrange for enough filespace to copy your entire drive. Twice
that if at all possible.

Try dd ( or the 'can handle I/O problems dd', but I always forget what it
is and searching for 'dd' is rather pointless ) first.

If you can get a dd image, copy it and experiment on that copy.

I think you know how to mount the image via loopback.

If my 2 TB of new disk were in already I'd offer to let you try to copy
your data over to that :).

As to services, Red Seven does drive recovery, but I think they farm it
out once it gets beyond a certain point. I think that point is lower than
what I know you know.

DataDoctors also does drive recovery. I don't know if they farm out the
hardware recovery methods as Red Seven does. One PLUG member works there,
but I'm not certain he's allowed to mention what their internal mechanisms
are. My knowledge of DataDoctors comes mostly from competition, so take
whatever I say about them with a grain of salt and then add some doubt :).

Hardware recovery tools are mucho expensive, so it's quite possible that
everybody in town farms that out to the same place.

ciao,

der.hans
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