Quote:
It appears that one of my 250Gb IDE disks has just snuffed it.


I plugged it in today to see what data I could salvage, and it wouldn't spin up. It just kept going crunch, crunch, whir, and wasn't detected in the BIOS.

In the end, I figured that I had nothing to lose and just gave it a sharp tap with a heavy screwdriver, and it's sorted itself out to the point where I can start trying to get the data off.

I'm still getting a huge number of read errors, but I hope to get some of the data back. Obviously, all of the retries are taking their toll, and it's probably not going to be finished until the morning.
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-- roger