Partially dead drive

[William Park]

Usually, I would 'dd' and work on the copy using KVM (ie. qemu).  But,
if you're already getting IO errors, then 'dd'ing may brick it for real.
On the other hand, you know it's going bad, so you may have no choice.

Being NTFS, your options are Windows-limited.  I used AOMEI Partition
Assistant
    http://www.aomeitech.com/aomei-partition-assistant.html
to resize NTFS partition on my XP laptop.  It has other capabilities, so
you may want to try that.
-- 
William

On Sun, Aug 04, 2013 at 10:26:05AM -0400, sciguy wrote:
> 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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