Recovery of Files from Failing Hard Drive
Posted: 03 Jun 2012, 00:36
Hi all,
Finals week is coming up and my computer just started having issues the day after it came out of warranty, so bear with me--I'm by no means an expert at any of this stuff, and just happened to stumble upon this site in my desperate search for a fix.
First thing's first, I'm running a Dell XPS 15, partitioned for Windows 8 and Ubuntu. It's fairly new, just got it a year ago. Yesterday, I started having issues when I booted up and received the "A disk read error occurred, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." After restarting a couple times and receiving the same error, it turned into a "error: hd0 out of disk." I can get to Grub to select my operating system, but after picking one, nothing happens.
I was able to check the SMART Data on my drive from a Ubuntu Live CD, and it's warning me that Disk Failure is Imminent with a Failing assessment in Reallocated Sector Count (Normalized: 133, Worst: 133, Threshold: 140, Value: 561 sectors) and a Warning assessment in Current Pending Sector Count (Normalized: 1, Worst: 1, Threshold: 0, Value: 65534 sectors). However, I can't mount my Windows partition in order to make backups of everything. I found TestDisk after a couple hours of searching, and thought I might be able to use it to retrieve my information before I did anything else...
As if that weren't enough, none of my usb ports are currently working, so I need to get these files on to CD's or DVD's. Sounds to me like its a hardware issue... Anyways, I'm unsure of where to proceed from here, and any help that I can get would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
-Flustered
Finals week is coming up and my computer just started having issues the day after it came out of warranty, so bear with me--I'm by no means an expert at any of this stuff, and just happened to stumble upon this site in my desperate search for a fix.
First thing's first, I'm running a Dell XPS 15, partitioned for Windows 8 and Ubuntu. It's fairly new, just got it a year ago. Yesterday, I started having issues when I booted up and received the "A disk read error occurred, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." After restarting a couple times and receiving the same error, it turned into a "error: hd0 out of disk." I can get to Grub to select my operating system, but after picking one, nothing happens.
I was able to check the SMART Data on my drive from a Ubuntu Live CD, and it's warning me that Disk Failure is Imminent with a Failing assessment in Reallocated Sector Count (Normalized: 133, Worst: 133, Threshold: 140, Value: 561 sectors) and a Warning assessment in Current Pending Sector Count (Normalized: 1, Worst: 1, Threshold: 0, Value: 65534 sectors). However, I can't mount my Windows partition in order to make backups of everything. I found TestDisk after a couple hours of searching, and thought I might be able to use it to retrieve my information before I did anything else...
As if that weren't enough, none of my usb ports are currently working, so I need to get these files on to CD's or DVD's. Sounds to me like its a hardware issue... Anyways, I'm unsure of where to proceed from here, and any help that I can get would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
-Flustered