One of the computers at work died yesterday. This pc happened to have some report generation software on it that was written by folk long departed and not backed up anywhere. On investigation today both of it's hard disks were fried, putting them in three other pc's, one of them was not recognised by the Bioses, the other had a corrupt partition table.
I did some googling and discovered that knoppix comes with a tool called 'gpart' which attempts to guess the partition table (guess partition: gpart, geddit?). I downloaded Knoppix 4.0 and tried running gpart but no joy.
As the two drives were identical I then tried swapping the drive electronics and now the Bios could see the other disk but the partition table was also toast and gpart gave an IO error.
In conclusion, failed to restore anything. However, I still think knoppix is has great potential as a data recovery tool.
Peter's Moblog
