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On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Martin Moores <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:moores.martin@gmail.com"
target="_blank">moores.martin@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div>I don't have room for all of it on the laptop and
thought I'd take a look at what was being produced. I
ddrescued the first 314MB[1] of the hard drive and it is
all zeros. Not looking good at all. <br>
<br>
Thanks for the help and suggestions people. Not sure I
want to spend $US89 on spinrite. Not even sure the
platters are moving. <br>
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Spinrite has a money back guarantee, (and honor it for any reason),
so it is risk-free if it does not work.<br>
<br>
That said, when I blew away a partition table, I used photorec on a
systemrescuecd to scan the drive for files. If found quite a few
video files, and those that were in contiguous blocks were recovered
and viewable. (About half of the many TV recordings on my disk.)<br>
<br>
At least that would tell you if it is just a partition table that
was lost. <br>
<br>
However, if your disk is actually failing, this could easily push it
over the edge to complete failure. (But so will most anything that
reads the entire disk repeatedly.)<br>
<br>
Good luck!<br>
<br>
Bob<br>
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