salvaging a dying hard disk

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:47:06 -0500, Curt wrote:

> On 07/27/2011 11:12 AM, compdoc wrote:
>>
>> >It is an internal drive. However I do have a USB/SATA adapter
>>
>> >I could try. not sure if that would make a difference or not.
>>
>> Internal connections are the best way. Leave it as is. Since you've
>> booted Ubuntu Live, you have the gnome Disk Manager (palimpsest). Does
>> that see the drive?
>>
>> Does the drive show up in the motherboard bios?
>>
> Neither disk manager nor BIOS see the drive. BIOS also does not see the
> good one, though disk manager does. Both are SATA disks.
> The motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X. Unlike my newer mobo, the BIOS in
> this one does not have a boot option that shows all connected hard
> drives, only "CD-ROM", "Removable Device", "IDE Hard Drive" and "Other
> boot device".
> IDE is showing only "none" and "disabled" for choices.

I think at this point you should first stop trying it in vain. Every 
single time you connect you drive and try to mount it increases chances 
to kill drive completely drastically.

I am not pretending to be giving you the best advise available. But if I 
were you, I would try the "put your hard drive in the freezer" trick at 
this point, with some addition though.

Freeze it, then connect as internal HD, and then instead of trying to 
mount it yourself from any LiveCD boot into Clonezilla and let it try to 
do the job for you. 

If Clonezilla succeeds to mount it you would be able to clone it at once. 
If Clonezilla would not mount it I doubt you would do a better job 
yourself.