[COLUG] Dead hard drives

[Jim]

On Sat, 30 Dec 2006 16:03:56 -0500 Brian Miller <bnmille at gmail.com> wrote:

> At the meeting today, we looked at a dead hard drive, 

Was it dead (hardware failure) or was the data just not useful? 

> and Linux "fdisk -l" 
> found no valid partition table on the disk.  I suggested that perhaps running 
> the DOS "fdisk /mbr e:", where e: represents the DOS drive letter of the 
> drive, might help recover it.

Before you start modifying stuff, it would be good to look at it first. 

dd if=/dev/hdx | xxd -g 1 -u | less