Direct access to unmounted disks

[NoOp]

On 11/03/2010 12:22 AM, Mark wrote:
> Are there any good utilities for doing i/o directly to disks that are not
> mounted, possibly not properly formatted?
> 
> I recently had a friend's computer die and when I initially tried to access
> the files on the primary hared drive, it reported back as not being
> formatted (which I knew was not the case).  In another setting I was able to
> mount and read the disk, but I was wondering what we do when that can't be
> done - what utility/ies do we use to recover disks that won't mount?
> 
> By "good utilities" I mean those that are relatively easy to use in order to
> read and possibly write a raw disk sector.  dd doesn't really qualify as
> "easy to use" but it would suffice in a pinch.

Test Disk:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
it's also in the repositories. I also recommend:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/