Partially dead drive

[sciguy]

I have a 1TB Seagate drive which, I admit, was partitioned when the NT 
drive was less than half full, and I didn't defrag the data to the start 
of the drive. It lasted a couple of months that way, then it all but 
bricked my computer. While the NT (W7) system partition was on a 
separate drive, GRUB was the MBR of the bad drive. The partitioning on 
the bad drive was done to install Linux. The NT partition on the bad 
drive was used for various data (no programs or system files) which I 
wanted to at least make a valiant attempt at trying to recover.

All of the linux partitions seemed to have survived somehow, but when 
mounting the NTFS partition, I get an I/O error, even when booting with 
parted magic (live mode).

I can use fdisk only if I invoke it when the bad drive is external and 
just turned on (in other words, no attempts to mount /dev/sdl1, the NTFS 
device in question, before that). When fdisk is used, I see what seems 
to be a complete partition table, along with secondary partitions, and 
the NTFS being on the first partition. I was reluctant to change 
anything until I did something less potentially destructive first.

So, I tried the mount command in a shell. "mount /dev/sda1 sda1" caused 
Parted Magic to recognize it as an NT partition, but then report an I/O 
error, and recommended "chkdsk/f" in Windows.

I booted into XP with the bad disk as an external drive, it mounted as 
drive letter P:, filesystem "RAW". Attempting chkdsk /f in a DOS shell 
resulted in my being told that chkdsk doesn't work for RAW filesystems.

The data in the NTFS partition is worth some trouble in trying to at 
least partially recover data. Is there anything anyone might suggest 
that I haven't tried?

Paul King


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