It’s been a disaster that my old hard drive is dead and I have lost all my data including those newly taken photos and unfinished documents L I immediately bought a new drive and threw myself into the data rescue.
Restoring the operating systems from the old backup is not straightforward. Booting from different partitions is a problem. I have created partitions with exactly same size as on the old drive for Mac OS and Linux. Mac OS Xx86 is not a problem, but Linux partition is, even after you changed the Linux partition active. This is because the Grub information has been lost. In order to reinstall Grub, I booted the computer from Linux installation CD and entered rescue mode. Then I followed this to install Grub again. An alternative to Grub is to use windows startup menu, what you need to do is to get a Linux boot sector file.
However I don’t have luck to get my data back from the old drive, because the drive is totally damaged. Something I have learned from the lesson:
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Backup data regularly (recommend Synchronize It!)
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Notice the noise from the hard drive. If it is abnormal, copy out the data immediately before the hard drive becomes dead.
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If windows cannot recognize the hard drive, using data recovery boot CD to boot the computer.
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Recommended software for data recovery include: Active Partition Recovery, Disk Commander and Easy Recovery.
