Tool for recovering data from crashed HD

[Dexter Ang]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> I've got a HD which seems to have problems. 
> ( I can't boot from it)
> 
> I would like to know what tools are available to actually
> perform some kind of data recovery or something.
> 
> Currently, I'm just booting into a copy of Knoppix and then mounting
> the HD and copying (what can be copied) off the drive to another network 
> location.
> 
> Sometimes it works. sometimes it just hangs at scp.
> 
> Pointers??

Is the HD still detected by the BIOS? If so, maybe it's just something 
screwy with the partition table. I've used "gpart" before. It 
automatically tries to detect the partition types on your harddrive, and 
recreates the partition table. I've done it on a dying HD before (one 
that kept losing knowledge of any partition). Booted up in Slackware, 
ran gpart from a floppy. That restored the partition table, booted up in 
Windows, backuped all files needed, then after a reboot the harddrive 
died. I didn't have a spare HD so I had to burn the data using Windows. 
And nope, MS's "fdisk /mbr" didn't work there.

HTH

dex