I have a friend whose win32 laptop died recently. It would boot, and even get to the windows pre-login splash screen. However, before any login prompt would load, the computer would restart.

The Geek Squad told her that she would need to buy a new computer, as it was just dead. A quick linux live-cd proved to me that in fact the computer would boot fine off of the CD. A bit more testing showed that a different laptop hard drive (from my linux laptop) worked fine. I assumed the hard disk was going and started to ddrescue the data off it. Sure enough I hit IO errors within the first GB.

So my question is this: I have in the ddrescue log the exact hardware blocks of the damage, which ddrescue replaced with 0's. So, is there any way to reverse look-up the file names? Since I have a laptop win WinXP SP2 (just kept for warranty reasons), I figured I would try to use my copy of those files. Not a perfect solution, but she has no install disc so her only other option is to buy a new copy of XP if she can find it, or buy Vista, and we are both broke college kids who can't afford that! :-)

I know that when I stat a file, I get the inode. Is there any relationship between the file system inode and the hard disc block?

Oh and PS, is Geek Squad incompetent everywhere, or just here? I swear I've heard no fewer than 8 stories of how they screw up peoples' PC's and never one about their fixing something.

have you tried to dd the bad drive to a good drive? I just dd one of my mail server drive which have a few bad sectors to a brand new drive. After few hours of waiting I was able to boot my system up with the new drive without losing anything at all. ddrescue will do the same thing. if your friend is missing her XP CD. You can go here www.demonoid.com and download the iso for XP then burn it to a CD. Make sure you download the right version of XP (Home or Professionals)&(OEM or Full version).

Oh yes, the drive has already been dd'ed over. However, ddrescue filled the 4Kb of damage in with 0's, and I know what hardware blocks those zeros are at, now I need to find the filenames so I can replace them.