harddrive problems

yawnmoth

The hard drive is most likely completely dead, I just replaced one in a laptop today with the exact same symptoms.

I did of coarse try to recover the data on the disk however it was badly damaged, and therefore I could only rescue a small amount of data. Hard drives usually give a warning before they fail, bad sectors, missing files, clicking sounds etc, when you get these, that is the time to back up your data (if you do not keep regular backups already)

I basically use a Linux live CD to mount the hard drive (connected to a home PC with laptop adapter) to search for undamaged files, then I mount the drive under windows and run checkdisk and file undelete programs. www.sysresccd.org www.knoppix.net www.geocities.jp-brkato (restoration) www.grc.com-sr-spinrite.htm (Spinrite)

I doubt I need to stress the importance of a regular backup schedule.

Any particular reason for using a laptop rather than a desktop or server, for the web-server ? Laptops are designed to be portable and are not the most efficient for that sort of thing, they usually have slow hard drives that are expensive to replace, and have very limited upgradability.

JD