Hard disk failure.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yes.

[jrwalliker]

Cloning the drive with ddrescue has already been suggested. Use the GNU version of ddrescue as it has a number of useful advantages over the other one with a similar name.

In particular, it keeps a logfile so that if the copying is interrupted by the computer crashing - which sometimes happens when copying broken drives - it can carry on more or less where it left off. ALso, it concentrates its efforts on the parts of the disc which are easy to read, only working hard on the bad bits later. This helps to get as much off the drive as possible before multiple reads of a bad area risk causing more damage. It can sometimes read drives that the original operating system failed even to detect.

When I had a difficult recovery I found it much better than anything else that I tried.

John