Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on #linux, the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!
Plug in drive, turn on PC, drive detected, 2 clicks from drive and warning from BIOS about imminent failure.. Bah.
Is gpart software still available now? I’m having the same problem but cannot find this tool anywhere.