cgsecurity.org

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

First thing to do is to duplicate your disk with ddrescue under gnu/linux. You'll need another hard disk, same size or bigger.

If your usb port are dead, you'll have to remove your hard disk from computer and connect in another with the destination (or by mean of a sata/usb adaptator).

Use a command like :
and be careful not to reverse source and destination.

The copy won't be easy, your disk in bad condition.