[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Owen Berry]

This morning my wife's computer crashed, the hard drive started making
clicking noises, and, when rebooted would get past the BIOS startup and
then stop with a flashing cursor in the top left hand corner of the
screen. The only good sign is that the BIOS detects the hard drive.

Seems pretty bad. My first thought was to try to recover whatever
possible using Knoppix. Tried booting off the CD, but all I got was the
flashing cursor. Went into the BIOS and double checked that the CD drive
came before the hard drive in terms of startup devices - it was. To be
sure, I changed all 3 options to be the CD drive. Still the same result.

I tried unplugging the hard drive and then booting off Knoppix, and
everything worked fine. Any ideas what I could be missing here?

Thanks.

-- Owen