Urgent: Help getting data from laptop drive

feenster99

feenster99

feenster99

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Joined
19 Jun 2003
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West Yorks, UK
Hi all,
I have a broken Dell D500 laptop sat in front of me that I need to get data off to put onto a new laptop. I have taken out the Dell's HD, and put it into a brand new Akasa Integral 2.5" USB converter. I plugged the USB into the new laptop and fired up a Knoppix 5 Live CD.

So all is well - sort of! I have managed to copy some data off (namely, "My Documents"). However, when I try to copy the Outlook PST file (the last file I need to copy), the transfer stalls. The disk starts to click in a rhythmic way.

I know the disk is probably on its way out, but is there anything I can do to retrieve this file? I have tried copying it to another location on the same disk, but again, the transfer stalls.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Matt
 
It might sound odd but sometimes if a disk is dodgy if you select copy from the right-click menu or the file menu then it sometimes works where an ordinary drag and drop fails(I'd assume this is because it gets copied into Ram rather than working on-the-fly?). However this is no help if you are using Linux of course.
 
Humm, just given this a try in Linux - no joy, same error :( Now, Windows is begining to not recognise the damn disk at all.

Any more things to try? I'm booting back into Linux now, so anything more I can do there would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Matt
 
Humm, tried a few more things and no joy.

Does anyone know of any tools that will check a disk for bad sectors or try to fix them, that can work on USB disks? Just wondering if I can narrow the fault down a little bit more.

Matt
 
How big is the disk? Do you have another drive with at least as much free space (preferably unpartitioned) available? (It's possible to resize an existing partition with free space in order to create unpartitioned space.)

I would grab a snapshot image of the failing disk with the "dd" command, ignoring read errors onto another disk, then try to run a logical filesystem check on the copied partition once on the healthy disk.
 
Problem solved.

After a very long and drawn out investigation, it was actually a PDF attached to a 2 year old email stuffed away in an old Outlook .PST file. Once I had isolated the issue, I was able to just move across everything except that one email and it worked fine.

A strange resolution, but at least I got it sorted. Even whacked the drive in the freezer overnight in the home it would jolt it back into life. Turned out to be software anyway!

Thanks for the help...

Matt
 
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