Urgent: Help getting data from laptop drive

feenster99 · 2 Nov 2006 at 20:47

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

feenster99 · 2 Nov 2006 at 21:18

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

feenster99 · 2 Nov 2006 at 21:31

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

feenster99 · 3 Nov 2006 at 07:13

Thanks ByteJuggler - I discovered the dd command late last night. I think I will give it a go later today.

Cheers,
Matt

feenster99 · 3 Nov 2006 at 22:29

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