On Tuesday 19 Oct 2004 1:17 pm, Philip Tellis wrote:

Sometime Today, sherlock@vsnl.com assembled some asciibets to say:

...

Are you sure about this one??

didn't you read my last line. I am sure. very sure. what do you think could go wrong? Oh yeah, forgot to mention. Use a freezer bag. You've

One of the common reasons the disk goes bad is when moisture or dust gets in thru the nicro filters. Freezing the disk will cause the moisture to freeze inside (even if it is in an airtight bag). Starting the drive when cold (i presumed that it would be started cold) should cause the ice crystals to shred the magnetic coating. Otoh the freezer air will be very dry and the drive should suck in dry air to possibly alleviate the moisture problem.

Please excuse the line length. I am using vsnl webmail which is possible the worst email account. Will be switching over to MTNL which allows smtp shortly.

Trevor wrote

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I do not have another disk to DD too. Am lending it to a friend to whom i shall request to DD first. Have also asked him to use recovery s/w to get as much data back as possible. You think these data recovery guys can get anything off ext3 sherlock???.

They mostly use a package called tiramisu which works with fat and ntfs, afaik that is the boundary of their universe. at least one of the guys in andheri doing recovery jobs never heard of ext2.

rgds jtd