I have a contribs server that was originally set up as 7.4, but updated. The most recent update apparently triggered a bad sector on the hard drive to become unreadable, and that sector has files which are required for the server to boot. So the server hangs up with a repetitive indicator of the unreadable files partway through the boot up sequence.
I do have a backup, but it was run several days ago and there is apparently critical email which needs to be recovered from the drive if at all possible. So I'm looking for any alternatives that might get that information recovered. I have a backup machine with new drive, with SME installed and the backup restored to it, just trying to find some way to recover the current email from the unbootable system.
I've booted an SME install CD and it hangs at the "detecting SME installations" screen, either trying the recovery option or the install/upgrade option. Spinrite was not able to recover the bad sector. It's not a fast machine at all, but I did get it to boot into a minimal live linux CD (linux mint 8 XFCE) but it didn't seem to be able to detect or read the drive. I'm not familiar with that distro though so maybe I wasn't looking in the right place.
So wondering if there would be a way to replace the missing files so that the system could boot and I could run a backup from it, or else a way to copy information directly from the drive to the new drive, or if there are other options that would work.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
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