Data recovery help request

[Rajiv Aaron Manglani]

> A family member's hard drive has started to fail.   I connected it to my 
> Windows box and Windows claimed it was a new drive and wanted to reformat it. 
> I said no.
> I then connected to my Linux box and it saw 4 partitions - two "unknown", one 
> Novell, and one NTFS.

do you know what the unknows were before failure? if the disk has physical 
problems you might want to copy the entire device to another disk first, 
and work on the copy. i have used ddrescue in the past for this as it will 
help work around bad sectors:
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

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