Recover hard drive

[neepie]

Hi,

My old laptop just died. I believe that it had an issue with the charger/the connector to the charger and it seems to me that there was a loose connection somewhere that caused it to fry the hardware (it makes a buzzing sound when the charger is plugged in). It was an old laptop, and I'm getting a new one anyway so I'm just going to get rid of the laptop, but unfortunately the hard drive got damaged as well. I do have a backup from about 2 months ago, but I'd like to recover the data from the hard drive (or at least some of it).

Here is what I've done so far. I plugged in the drive in a different computer, and it seems that the partition table is gone (or corrupt). I ran testdisk on it, but that did not give me a correct partition scheme (came up with a lot of partitions, and no partitions that seemed to make sense). The drive was partitioned into 3 partitions (sda1 = boot / ext2; sda2 = swap; sda3 = data / reiserfs), but I don't remember exactly how big the first 2 partitions were (boot is probably 32MB/64MB/100MB; swap probably somewhere between 500MB and 1GB), so just running fdisk to recreate the partition table won't work.....

I have used dd to create a copy of the hard drive, so that I can play with that without messing with the data on the drive itself.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[cwr]

The place to start is probably DFSee, if you can mount the hard drive
on a working system somehow. DFSee is DOS-based, so I don't think
you can get it to work with images.

Will