I apologize in advance for this long post but I want to be thorough. My laptop recently crashed about 5 minutes after being resumed from sleep state (windows vista) immediately following its transport from my friend's house to my house in my car. I hard shut down and when it booted, my grub bootloader (dual booting w/ linux, i'll explain later) reported an error 17, described in another forum as an error that occurs when grub is "unable to reconcile its present knowledge of disk structures with the new one it is confronted with." Obviously, I'm thinking corrupt HD.

Also, after a few tries i could boot to the screen where the continuous loading bar for vista with "microsoft corp." underneath it, but no further until it would hang and id have to hard shut down. Two or three tries with this, and i started getting error 17 EVERY time, which all i've gotten since.

I booted into a live CD, ubuntu gutsy gibbon 7.10, and ran a few tests, i'll post the output:

root@ubuntu:~/Desktop# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc202b441

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 12075 96987505+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 13731 14593 6932047+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 12076 13654 12683317+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 13655 13730 610470 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 13655 13730 610438+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order
root@ubuntu:~/Desktop#

=======================================

root@ubuntu:~/Desktop# gpart /dev/sda

Begin scan...
Possible partition(Windows NT/W2K FS), size(94714mb), offset(0mb)

* Warning: short read near sector(193984686), 62976 bytes instead of 66048. Skipping...

* Warning: read error (EIO) near sector(193984809), skipping...

* Warning: short read near sector(199291425), 53248 bytes instead of 66048. Skipping...

* Warning: read error (EIO) near sector(199291529), skipping...

* Warning: short read near sector(200800442), 56832 bytes instead of 66048. Skipping...

....goes on for about 15 different times....

* Warning: read error (EIO) near sector(218888631), skipping...
Floating point exception (core dumped)

root@ubuntu:~/Desktop#

=======================================

root@ubuntu:~/Desktop# fdisk /dev/sda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 14593.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)


Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
Syncing disks.
root@ubuntu:~/Desktop#

=============================================

root@ubuntu:~/Desktop# ls -al /dev/sd*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2008-12-20 18:13 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2008-12-20 18:13 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 2008-12-20 18:13 /dev/sda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 4 2008-12-20 18:13 /dev/sda4
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 5 2008-12-20 18:13 /dev/sda5
root@ubuntu:~/Desktop#


==============================================

My PC is an HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6253cl to be exact), with a 120gig HD. Came refurbished w/ an added gig of ram (now up to 2gigs), came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I used Vista's disk partition utility to shrink my Vista partition, then installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 on its own partition and made a swap partition. I also installed GRUB as my bootloader. This being said i'll share what MY interpretation of my own disk partitions is with reguard to the linux tests i ran

i KNOW that /dev/sda is my hd, or im about 95% sure

i propose /dev/sda1 is my vista partition, /dev/sda2 is the recovery partition, /dev/sda3 is the ubuntu linux partition, /dev/sda4 i dont know, /dev/sda5 is swap

im by no means well-versed in linux, only installed out of curiousity. Any corrections to the above proposition will help me out.

Additionally, reguarding the problem, when I boot the live Ubuntu cd, it takes almost a full 30 minutes to boot, and gives constant errors and exceptions most notably a REPEATED input/output error on sda3, logical block 1 or 2 or 3 or up to i think 6, scattered about in the mess of output during bootup. The live cd, once booted, works fine though (it's what i'm using to type this post)

So now i've described the problem. What do i need? I want the files on the Vista partition. The hd is toast as far as im concerned and i have a new one on the way. Im asking from these message boards either some help/advice/guidance/reference towards salvaging these files, or at least a possible explanation of what went wrong, or CAN it even be recovered. Ive done a fair amount of research and came up with very little, so I'm asking for a little human assistance. I appreciate any time and effort put in to even reading this post and will be infinitely grateful for any offered assistance. Thanks, Kyle


P.S.
I should also add that i made NO changes to the hard drive for at least a year before this crash happened. I installed linux WAY back and the hard drive has worked 100% fine since. This recent crash happened at random, as a result of what i speculate to be damage due to transportation. I know for sure i cannot mount the filesystem for either partition within the ubuntu live cd (reports that disk is read-only, or in use, suggests something about the "safely remove hardware" option in vista which has nothing to do with it obviously), and any attempt (as stated) to write the partition table fails. Finally, to be clear, i can not boot from the hard drive in any way, the only way my computer boots is into a bootable .iso. It's a laptop, too, so there is only one hard drive port and no way to connect additional drives.

Sounds like some bad sectors on your drive. Definitely recoverable. Let a pro do it or if you're really into doing it yourself look up dd_rescue.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Thanks for the suggestion, dd_rescue might point me in the right direction (i can't afford any 'professional' help, i was barely able to buy a new drive). I'll definitely look into it.

New development on the HD though: fdisk -l no longer produces output, grub error 17 takes MUCH longer to come up, sometimes pc repeatedly restarts itself and doesnt even get to the GRUB loading screen or even the Ubuntu disk. Advice from a friend also indicated a possible HD controller problem / other hardware issue. If I can get the hd to be recognized again w/ fdisk i'll try to screw w/ dd_rescue. Otherwise, thanks for your help

For linux livecd work I normally use knoppix... for drives bad enough that they hang up the BIOS you can try unplugging it, then replugging it once you get to the knoppix boot prompt. Boot options like nofstab and noudev (since you have a sata drive) might also be helpful.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

You should use ddrescue instead of dd_rescue

They are different tools.

I'll look into ddrescue too, thanks. I'll also give a try to the HD plugging trick to see if i can get bast BIOS. Thanks again for all your help.