Many failing drives fail when the actuator arm holding the read/write heads is moving allot. One of the best things you can do is have another larger drive partitioned, formatted and either installed internally or a USB drive. Boot a Live CD and mount the new large partitioned drive and use dd to make an image of the failing drive onto the new drive. The partition on the new drive needs to be larger than the size of the failing drive and formatted with a file system with unlimited file size.
Then you can either mount the image and read it normally as if it were a drive, or dd it onto another drive and try and boot it, if done correctly, it should boot.
When making an image of a drive, the actuator arm only moves from one end of the drive to the other once, most every time you'll get the image. But trying to boot a failing drive and reading data off it to copy somewhere else most often leads to hiring expensive data recovery services if the data is worth it.
In any event, it's best not to run it anymore till you're set up to make an image, the most failsafe approach to recovering precious data.
Even when it completely quits and the bios can't talk to it anymore, it can be revived without opening it up, but that's a trade secret that will cost $$ to have the procedure posted here.
Last edited by Junior Hacker; 04-25-2008 at 10:02 PM.
Reason: grammer
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