On 08/10/2011 20:41, Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
> Well, looks like the harddrive. Get a drive now, your's could fail any second.
>
> If you do not hear a clicking noise from your drive, then I'd say you make a
> 1:1 copy with a live CD (e.g.: puppy linux), replace your old drive with the
> new one and keep going till you find time to reinstall.
>
> Nik

Copying 1:1, strictly speaking (e.g. using dd), a defunct disk could lead you to obtain a 
clone that is less functional than the original.  I had the problem because of bad sectors 
on a huge xfs logical volume (lvm).  I was simply unable to mount/check/restore the clone 
xfs volume after cloning it with dd.  I ended to reformat the new hdd manually and make 
copies with rsync which, at least, was able to copy 99% of the files, except the files 
written on bad blocks.

Nicolas