recover WinXP ntfs hd from Linux 556

I had a similar experience (modest head crash, lunched about 190 consecutive sectors) then had XP offer to reinstall itself, only to die on the first bad block it encountered, when I tried to use the M$ WinXP recovery CD. Grrr.

I spent about 18 months carting around a laptop as a paperweight, then, as you did, happened to look at the disk when booted up from a Linus (SimplyMEPIS Debian) distro CD burned for me by a friend.

Lo, and behold, there was (most of) my long lost software development output.

My approach was to tar-gzip-split the recoverable data to my FAT3 external 250G HD, then reformat the damaged internal drive as a Linux e*3 drive, with a bad blocks check (took several full days to run to completion). Given any reasonable alternative, I'd have taken the software recovered and run, but in the fact, I cannot afford that, and am typng this article on that same laptop, booted in Debian Linux from that same damaged but still usable HD.

I don't know a way to recover the drive in MS-Win, but making it useful again at all, by an OS change, was surely possible. Of course, this may not be of any use at all to your friend, but I pbutt it along, FYI.

FWIW

xanthian.

--