data recovery service, catastrophic failure

[Nathan Aubrey]

On Monday 02 April 2007, Lynn Newton wrote:
> > Do you have any way of yanking the precious drive and putting it in
> > another, working machine? No need to boot from it, just get it in a
> > working machine. If you can, then you may be able to get everything off
> > of it yourself. If you can get to a Linux machine then it'll obviously
> > be easier.
>
> I don't have that luxury. I have a Linux P3 system that hasn't been booted
> in nearly two years, but it doesn't support SATA drives.
>
> My other two systems are both Macs.
>
> > If not, check out sysresccd.org.
>
> Okay, that looks interesting.
>
> > You may be tempted to keep trying things with the old machine, but since
> > it's being cranky and you don't really know why, I recommend getting the
> > drive out of it ASAP.
>
> This sounds like a wise recommendation. But then what do I do with
> sysresccd once
> i have it on a bootable disk? (Which I assume is the process.) Isn't the
> object generally to perform operations on a sick disk in the system?

In a secondary system, not the primary system. If indeed the BIOS or 
motherboard is failing, your perfectly good hard drive could be damaged from 
the rest of the system. It is best to move the drive to an alternate system.
Most PC repair shops have a small or free diagnostic service. You could ask 
them to check the drive on another machine and verify the data is there. 
Also, they could check what is wrong with the pc as well.