[Techtalk] method to replace bad disk

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 4:41 AM, Sunbird <sunbird_0 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What would be the better way of reconstituting a failed disk in windows xp?
>

I'll just comment on the first thing you do when something like this happens.

1. Boot a live cd
2. Copy, byte for byte, the old partition to an external hard drive or
the like (lots of livecds have dd_rescue which sets dd up with the
correct options to do this). Everything you do on the drive at this
point stresses it and might cause it to fail entirely, so you might as
well get all data you can off off it as quickly as you can.
3. Take the disk out of your pc and never use it to store data ever
again. It's unlikely that a virus causes errors the type that would
show up as disk errors, more likely the drive is just fried and your
antivirus scanner got confused.

Then you have a disk image, you can see if you can mount it (with -o
loop) in linux. If that doesn't work there's a bunch of packages you
could try that try to scan the filesystem and tease out individual
files.

regards,
Wim