Partially dead drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

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?

Did you resize the existing partition with parted or similar?  Or did
you just change the partition table?

-- 
Len Sorensen
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