Hi;
I am trying to rescue a friend's hard disk. It seems dead to me but I
thought I might ask here for anything left to try.
Problem:
* His Maxtor 40GB SCSI disk worked up until recently;
* It was dual boot into WindowsXP and Ubuntu Gutsey;
* He was using 'parted' while in Ubuntu to extend (enlarge) the
WindowsXP partition when suddenly it burped without finishing
and would not restart;
Attempted solutions:
* swapped in and out of two machines as both master and slave;
* BIOS on both machines identifies the make and size of the disk
correctly as both master or slave;
* used rescue disk ==> parted and fdisk;
* parted returns "unable to open /dev/sdb -- unrecognized disk
label"
* fdisk returns "unable to read /dev/sdb"
* Tried fdisk /mbr from my Windows - Dos partition. It returned
"Can't write mbr" or some such error message.
* At this point, I would like to be able to boot either Ubuntu or
WindowsXP
He would like to rescue his data and/or disk and I would like to help
him. (This is a pre-owned machine which had WindowsXP included but no
re-installation disk.)
Any thoughts, suggestions, tips or help welcomed.
--
Regards Bill