Hard Drive recovery problem

[JamesCurtis]

Hey guys, I have a hard drive that I store my quickbooks and family pictures on. I was planning on backing it up but I never quite got there. Just last night my windows computer crashed and had a hard disk read error on a black screen. I pulled it out of that computer and tried it on one of my other windows computers in an external enclosure, and when I hook it up to that windows machine it locks up the windows machine.

I just put it in my gentoo machine and I mounted it, but when I list the directory in its root directory ( I mounted it in /home/backup ) it says input/output error. Is there a more involved route I could take to recover the data, or am I doing something wrong?

Any help would be great at this point, there were a lot of pictures on there that I would like back I guess it's my own fault for being a procrastinator.

Thanks!

[NeddySeagoon]

JamesCurtis,

Before you do any more, make an image of the disk or the partition using dd_rhelp.
Then put the drive on one side. That will preserve whats left on the drive.

What filesystem is the partition?
I guess NTFS or FAT32

There are recovery tools for FAT32 but I'm noot sure about NTFS.
You can run them after you have made your image - they sometimes make things worse, not better.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[bubbl07]

My friend used Active's Partition Recovery program to recover data from my old hard drive (NTFS) after the MFT became corrupted. I got 99% of my data back. If you really need the data back, I highly recommend looking into it. Their Windows client is easy to use, but they do have a DOS version (I haven't used it, but it seems to do the job just as well).

Obligatory disclaimer: Always back everything up before you do anything!

[Kovid]

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html