🚀 go-pugleaf

John Ferris wrote about a damaged hard disc.

If you can recover the whole disc, well and good. This is something 
that's best put in the hands of experts.

Once you decide to give up and reformat the disc, try examining it 
after FDISK and before FORMAT. It's conceivable that it will become 
readable (if the partition table was damaged, and you repartition it 
excatly the way it was).

You can also use various tools such as Norton Utilities to try to 
salvage data. You can make things worse this way unless you know what 
you're doing. Once you've decided to reformat, you've nothing to 
lose, though.

What sort of information is lost, and how important is it? If it's 
text, you can often recover it (basic text, without formatting) by 
various tedious procedures, even if proper files can't be restored. 
Binary files, where a one-byte difference makes the file unusable, 
are more difficult.

HTH,
-- 
Michael Salem