What I usually do is put the disk in another machine and then use dd_rescue to 
do a byte by byte copy (bad sectors and all) of the affected disk to a known 
good harddrive.  Once I have that I run a fsck for the appropriate file 
system type.  I've used this technique in the past to recover all but 15MB of 
of 60GB of data off a hard drive.

dd_rescue works like the "dd" command but ignores (handles) I/O errors.  When 
it encounters an I/O error it reattempts the read at a smaller block size 
until it reads as musch of the data as it can.  This can obviosly take a 
*very* long time, but you will get as much of your data back as is possible.  
You then pull the (hopefully) few files you were not able to recover from 
your latest backup (hopefully).

dd_rescue can be found here:

http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

On Thursday 22 January 2004 04:47 pm, PHPTOm wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> A 40 gig deskstar hard drive I use here at work is making clicking sounds
> and dead. Anyone dealt with this?  We do not have a budget for data
> recovery.  Are we screwed?
>
> TOm
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
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-- 

Ben Maas - Technology Architect
Open Technology Systems, LLC
-----------------------------------------------------------
eMail: bmaas at open-techsys.com
Web:   http://www.open-techsys.com
Phone: 952.448.3121
Fax:   952.448.4944
Cell:  612.743.3674


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