help! data recovery

[toxic veins]

im having trouble booting up my laptop that has windows xp installed i just need to get some files off my hd, so i booted up into live cd i mount /dev/sda everything seem to be going fine and as im going through my files and using "ls" command to list the files within the directory i start hearing clicking sound coming from my harddrive and it just hangs for a really long time and eventually i start getting "cannot access (certain files or directories) Input/output error, and a list of files which it was able to read. does this mean the hd is corrupt and irrecoverable? any advice would be greatly appreciated

[hawaii67]

Ouch that's bad news.
You could analyze the kind of sound:

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

Or check out this article:
http://articles.directorym.co.uk/Get...-a1029421.html

In worst case you may need a professional data recovery service......

[xorred]

Solid State Hard Drives.. that's what I can say ... as soon as I get the money for it, I'll just throw away my hdds and replace them with ssds, for the same reason - moving parts are not as trustable as solid memory. And yes, the hdd is probably gone, considering the prices of professional data recovery (disassembling the drive and reading the data off the platters using another hdd mechanism) prices are in the multiple $K, ... bad news, indeed.

[Archangel-Amael]

Solid State Hard Drives.. that's what I can say ... as soon as I get the money for it, I'll just throw away my hdds and replace them with ssds, for the same reason - moving parts are not as trustable as solid memory. And yes, the hdd is probably gone, considering the prices of professional data recovery (disassembling the drive and reading the data off the platters using another hdd mechanism) prices are in the multiple $K, ... bad news, indeed.

Of course with solid state drives the price per gig is not nearly as cheap as a normal hdd. As for recovering the data the OP could try and do it himself using data recovery tools better suited to the task. Or he could take to compatible drives apart and swap the platters. It may or may not work but if the data is that valuable and the op that cheap or broke then it might be worthwhile.

EDIT: also there is a great resource here that I wanted to add.

[Thorn]

I just found this data recovery tool last week, and it worked well for me: Emergency Boot CD. It is a Linux Bootable CD ISO, and it comes in two versions: Demo (Free) and Full ($29.95 USD). The Demo version will recover to removable media (diskettes, flash, USB, etc.) while the Full will recover to addtional fixed disks. It's a good product for 30 bucks, and is available for download.

In my case it recognized and mounted drives that Windows and several flavors of Linux wouldn't mount. Highly recommended.

www.prime-expert.com/ebcd/

[steve_baker]

when i have a hard drive to recover i use dd_rescue, it will take forever but it gets the job done.

[Erjon]

I've used GetDataBack from runtime dot org
and the results were quite good.
The sw comes with 2 versions, one for FAT the other or NTFS according to file system used

[Rhuwme]

i just ran some data recovery at work last week for my principal. her laptop was partially reimaged by a coworker of mine while i was out on paternity leave. anyway, FileScavenger 3.2 plus the following hardware allowed me to recover all the files i wanted from her drive (which was a regular HDD - i'm not going over to solid state). Oh, and the school paid for the usb drive adapter for me