[ILUG] Dead Hard Disk

[Ronan Mullally]

I'm hoping somebody can shed a bit of light in the "tips to bring a disk 
back to life for long enough to rsync off it" department.

I've a Toshiba laptop hard disk which has run absolutely fine for the 
past 3 years.  No occasional errors, no SMART warnings (not that I 
looked much), no nasty noises.

I shut the laptop down this morning after a 4 day uptime.  Drove into 
town, turned it on again a couple of hours later and got the grub> 
prompt rather than the usual menu.  Further investigation when I got 
home suggests the disk is 100% dead (the BIOS is now just saying 
'Operating system not found').    It doesn't even sound like it's 
spinning up.  I've booted off a floppy and the kernel shows half a
dozen attempts to read hda before giving up.

Any suggestions?  Any ideas how much a commercial hard disk recovery 
would cost?  I don't hold out much hope.  There's nothing particularly 
critical on the disk, but it'd be nice to do a final rsync before I take 
the sledgehammer to it.


-Ronan