Story of a hard-disk crash and recovering data from it..

A few days back the ThinkPad I work on started behaving wierdly and the wierdness increased monotonically and then gave way to predictability..i.e. the TP refused to boot after a certain point in time. Tech support analysis confirmed that it was a disk crash...it did make wierd noises...The repair centre then gave me back the disk to salvage data whichever way I could..(no integrated "repair TP and get data salvaged too" solution was offered unfortunately).
So I put the hard disk in an USB enclosure and looked at what I could get...Initially the signs were very discouraging and I was not able to see any partition even though a USB device was being detected..After much thought, Neeraj Sharma (of key mapping fame :)) came to the rescue and pointed out that the disk was password protected (IBM security policy :) ) and this could be a reason it was not readable on USB. So he and another colleague, Ramanathan, put it back in a Thinkpad with easily removable disks and diabled the password after which I plugged it back into USB. After a rather long wait I saw that the boot partition was completely invisible but the other two were. Most of my data was fortunately on those and I managed to copy it just like that and some after running a disk scan. A further disk scan later the boot partition too was repaired and was up for scavenging. Managed to get some data out of it but a rather big (350MB+) mail archive file was not recovered since the copy would terminate after about 120 MB due to unknown reasons. Anyways, thanks the help from Neeraj Sharma and Ramanathan and the USB enclosure a lot of data was recovered and time and money which otherwise would have been spent on some third party vendor were saved.

Mapping keys on a ThinkPad

If you miss the windows key or the application/right click key (I know Prerana did at some point of time) on your ThinkPad then you will be pleased to read this. Click the blue button i.e. Open "Access IBM" using the button on the TP or the desktop shortcut. Then "Manage keyboard & pointing devices" -> "Map keys to functions" and customize as you like. Thanks to Neeraj Sharma for enlightening me!

Getting help in Mumbai..

Got the following mail from Suhail today morning..

Just a quick update that two new blogs that have come up in the past few days, w.r.t. the recent Mumbai flooding tragedy (& in general Maharashtra rains).
http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com - relief/rehab info, NGOs. hospitals, medical care, ambulances etc...etc. (long-term help)
http://cloudburstmumbai.blogspot.com -- running news tracker, collated by a host of bloggers spread all over (mainly frm Bbay), about news/links related to this incident. e.g. - telehpone/water/electricity going on-off-on in certain areas, roads/rlystations/airports opening-closing etc..drainage, sewerage, filth conditions..even individual calls for help, and getting in touch with lost folks. etc..etc.

More details can be had here from my blog. I am a contributor on both of these. Pls spread the links, on yr blogs, in your organizations and to yr folks who might have anything to do with Bbay. feel free to write back to me, with any queries/suggestions.