hello fellow linux'ers!
I'm in quite a pickle, since i'm suspecting my hard disk is dying. What is the most effective way to save as much data as possible? It's the disk where all my stuff is, so i'll have to copy about 140 Gigabyte of data as gently as possible onto another hardrive of similar size

If your system is up now, do NOT turn it off, if you suspect the drive is dying.

As far as being gentle goes...not sure that's an issue. Any access of the drive will be just as harsh as any other, but I will suggest that you keep it single-threaded. That is, run ONE copy job, and let it chug along till it's done. Don't fire up three in the background...let the drive process one file at a time.

Method? Depends...if you've got another drive in a USB enclosure, mount it up, and just CP the files/directories over. Maybe burn to CD/DVD? Or if you can access another share over the network, use SCP to copy the data.

I recommend copying the important data first, stuff you can't replace, then get the rest. Try to reduce drive read and write tasks, so don't run programs that you don't need to, just copy data one file at a time like TB0ne says.

Imaging the drive is another option, especially if the drive is almost full and all the data is just as important, you can use ddrescue to image it to another drive then extract the data that is intact. Use this method if you suspect data to be corrupted and/or you expect parts of the drive to become unreadable soon.

Phew! It turns out it was just unproperly handled by wine! My data is safe, even though i did all the wrong things (rebooting). It still works, but i'll keep the advice handy if the need should ever arise. Thanks for the quick replies