help with the recovery of a head crash with a MS ntfs file system.

[J]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 15:59, Knapp <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, I have a nice working Kubuntu install with lots of extra storage space.
> I also have my relatives laptop that has ALL their baby pictures that
> were never backed up!
> Their kid tossed the computer onto the floor and now the drive is dead
> with read errors and the MS recovery disk can't help.

<SNIP>

> I have never done anything like this before so don't be afraid to tell
> me all the stupid details and point to good links.

Honestly,  In cases like this, your absolute, best option (or more
importantly, your relatives' best option) is to suck it up and find a
good data recovery service and pay a professional to recover the
pictures.

On any of my disks (keep in mind that I make redundant backups of
everything) I'd be willing to try data recovery from a dead/dying
disk, and I've done that before, though to varying levels of success,
using things like DD to image the drive to a file, mounting the disk
on a different system read-only and copying individual files, and so
forth, but with something like you're talking about, I really cringe
at the thought of someone who's never done it before asking for help
on a website or mailing list and attempting to recover one-of-a-kind,
irreplaceable images.  It'd be a lot like a DIY vasectomy...

That may not be terribly useful to you, but honestly, that is my best
suggestion.  Were this just a hard drive that had some computer game
save data on it, or something like that, maybe some MP3 files and
movies, that would be one thing.  But given what you said regarding
all your relatives' baby pictures and no backups, I wouldn't chance
it.  Personally, I wouldn't want to be responsible for losing however
many years of their child's life :)

Given your statement that the laptop was dropped, there's a better
than good chance that the problem is that the heads were jarred agains
the platters.

Here are a couple things that may help, or at least give you something
to think about, but YMMV, I am not responsible for ANYTHING that may
happen, be it success or failure, or destruction:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4294038.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Recover-a-Dead-Hard-Disk

But far more importantly, look into these (and other similar services):
http://www.dtidata.com/
http://www.harddriverecovery.org/

Cheers
Jeff

-- 

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach  - "Even a stopped clock is right twice a
day." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marie_von_ebnereschenbac.html