dear gurus,

i had encounter 1 of my pc ide harddisk suddenly failed. it shows me imminent drive failure, replace by new disk, backup your data. this message shows at boot or startup during bios process.

there was ntfs c/d drive partition and i install windowsxp+ubuntu over windows as testing purpose. running fine slowly i found the hard disk response very slow. at last it is dead.

now it shows hard disk via various utilities like gparted, booting.

but i want to know, can we do low level formatting, what are the benefits of this. what tools r best to do recovery hard disk or repair harddisk. disk partition utility usualy do not have this features.

is there any way to recover such hard disk that still shown or appear on screen, but no data, since i found it wipe out eveyrthing from drive


suggest and advise for it.
kind regards
salim

Hi,
I have found some of the utilities on Hiren's BootCD are suitable for what you are looking for. DD is good but it sounds like your drive is beyond it.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Hard disks are generally not repaired. It is rarely possible. The only thing to do is to try to recover the data (using tools such as DD or other) and buy a new disk.

I am having the same problem and have already worked out that I need to clone the drive (or something similar). I think the best thing would be an equivalent of Norton Ghost but for linux, that allows the whole drive to be imaged, then restored to a new drive.

Can anyone recommend a bare metal backup/restore for linux? Naturally, I will be restoring to the same machine (same CPU, motherboard, etc.). The ONLY difference will be a new (and hopefully error free) harddrive. Any good ideas? (Preferably something easy to use, like Ghost or DriveImage. Cheap would be good. Free would be outstanding!!.)

Is it possible to simply clone a drive (copy sector for sector from one device to the other) with special software (say, boot from floppy) by connecting two drives together? Would that work? (I'd prefer a backup/restore method mentioned above.)


(salimshahzad: I hope you don't mind me piggybacking on your thread. Perhaps we can both find help in a single go.)

PS: I am running openSUSE 11.0 on a Pentium 4 2.80 GHz, 2GB dram, with an IDE Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM DiamondMax Plus. (I have extra similar hard drives.) The motherboard is an ECS model (I can get the precise model if needed.) There is no dual-boot nonsense, or funky virtual machine stuff. Just a straight, vanilla, no-nonsense, out-of-the-box, openSUSE three-partition install.

Clonezila...

If you want a live-cd to clone copy a HDD or files, Clonzilla will serve. A linux installation or live-cd wiil have the command "dd" which can copy data directly. There are wikis, a long thread and many questions on "dd" here at LQ.

http://clonezilla.org/

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...ything_With_DD

Gosh, thorkelljarl, thanks for all the great links and resources. I shall check them out and provide useful feedback.

By the way, have you ever heard of, or tried, mondorescue?
http://mondorescue.org/

Any thoughts? Pros/cons? Comparisons?

Cheers!

Maybe your best bet...

Clonezilla might be the easiest to use, but their documentation wasn't the easiest to understand. You might try google for a guide or howto.