Hi.
I'm trying to see if I can clone a hard-drive that was in all likelihood damaged by a power outage.
The HDD contained an operating system which would be very useful if restored as it was, on a new drive.
So the hard-drive is still detected in the BIOS of that computer, correct size, but would not boot at all. (It used to, but the power outage took very long, and very soon after the power came back the HDD failed. It was booted, worked for a while and then the OS stopped responding; upon reboot nothing worked anymore.) The drive is also constantly making a noise somewhat like a circular saw, always whirring, and almost always very loud. Very rarely, the noise lowers its volume temporarily, and then raises back to the same extremely loud pitch again for long, long intervals.
The hard-drive must have been practically frozen during the power outage (- in wintertime).
On some boot attempts, the computer itself says "Primary HDD not found", or "error" and then asks user to press F1 to go to CMOS settings.
Would this tool: Ddrescue, from the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD - I saw an article by someone at Geeky Projects describing how to utilize this, but 2 additional empty HDDs are needed - so, would Ddrescue work to read this drive, create a raw recovery file on the second drive, and then create the actual clone onto the third drive, as described in the article even though not even a SpinRite diskette program manages to detect it?? Or should a professional be employed for this?
(Again, only the BIOS detects it, when asked to detect all drives, that's it. But unfortunately it cannot be selected to boot from, even in BIOS - I can only seem to select Floppy and CD-ROM.)
I'm asking for impressions and advice from other people first because it would be extremely hard for me to get two empty drives for the process in the article. Which seems to be the only chance for recovery. One empty drive is okay, I guess I could find one, but for the second I don't know...
And also I'm inquiring because I could use some opinions about whether it is recoverable or not. Either by myself and/or by paid specialists only. Whatever. I'd like to know.
The failing drive is a Fujitsu, by the way. 10 GB, approximately.
However, I do need to recover the bootable XP Operating System with its programs and files. Could it be done?
I'm trying to see if I can clone a hard-drive that was in all likelihood damaged by a power outage.
The HDD contained an operating system which would be very useful if restored as it was, on a new drive.
So the hard-drive is still detected in the BIOS of that computer, correct size, but would not boot at all. (It used to, but the power outage took very long, and very soon after the power came back the HDD failed. It was booted, worked for a while and then the OS stopped responding; upon reboot nothing worked anymore.) The drive is also constantly making a noise somewhat like a circular saw, always whirring, and almost always very loud. Very rarely, the noise lowers its volume temporarily, and then raises back to the same extremely loud pitch again for long, long intervals.
The hard-drive must have been practically frozen during the power outage (- in wintertime).
On some boot attempts, the computer itself says "Primary HDD not found", or "error" and then asks user to press F1 to go to CMOS settings.
Would this tool: Ddrescue, from the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD - I saw an article by someone at Geeky Projects describing how to utilize this, but 2 additional empty HDDs are needed - so, would Ddrescue work to read this drive, create a raw recovery file on the second drive, and then create the actual clone onto the third drive, as described in the article even though not even a SpinRite diskette program manages to detect it?? Or should a professional be employed for this?
(Again, only the BIOS detects it, when asked to detect all drives, that's it. But unfortunately it cannot be selected to boot from, even in BIOS - I can only seem to select Floppy and CD-ROM.)
I'm asking for impressions and advice from other people first because it would be extremely hard for me to get two empty drives for the process in the article. Which seems to be the only chance for recovery. One empty drive is okay, I guess I could find one, but for the second I don't know...
And also I'm inquiring because I could use some opinions about whether it is recoverable or not. Either by myself and/or by paid specialists only. Whatever. I'd like to know.
The failing drive is a Fujitsu, by the way. 10 GB, approximately.
However, I do need to recover the bootable XP Operating System with its programs and files. Could it be done?