Originally Posted by AgentCash

Just a tip, I just had a hard drive crash myself after a power outage, the drive started spewing out thousands upon thousands of bad sector errors, and I thought for sure I had lost a large chunk of my data. I immediately unhooked the failing drive & ordered a new drive that was a bit larger. Got the new drive the next day and decided to see what, if anything, I could salvage.

I downloaded RIP (Recovery Is Possible) Linux. It's a bootable CD with tons of recovery tools ddrescue or dd_rescue is all you'd really need if you're lucky. I sed ddrescue to do a low-level copy from the failing drive to the new drive, ran fsck (file system check) mounted the new image (mount -o loop...) and there all my files were.

Turns out I only lost 10 MB of system files on a 250 GB hard drive. So if your harddrive still spins up, and you have important data that wasn't recently backed up, I suggest giving RIP a try.

Just my


Edit: forgot to include a link http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/