If I can't pull the hard drive out right there, I use a live usb stick of either ubuntu or CAINE/Trinity Rescue CD, then run smartmontools short test to see if it is really dying. I also try mounting the partition and checking dmesg output.
If I can see that the hard drive is dying, I pull the drive out and run ddrescue on another machine, until I can pull off a good image.
If it's simply a partition issue, and I can't mount it or repair the filesystem right away, then I run testdisk. Of course, a good chkdsk on an NTFS partition can almost always help.
DDRESCUE RULES!!! NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH that OTHER DD_RESCUE!!!
Slashdot Mirror
If I can't pull the hard drive out right there, I use a live usb stick of either ubuntu or CAINE/Trinity Rescue CD, then run smartmontools short test to see if it is really dying. I also try mounting the partition and checking dmesg output. If I can see that the hard drive is dying, I pull the drive out and run ddrescue on another machine, until I can pull off a good image. If it's simply a partition issue, and I can't mount it or repair the filesystem right away, then I run testdisk. Of course, a good chkdsk on an NTFS partition can almost always help. DDRESCUE RULES!!! NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH that OTHER DD_RESCUE!!!