On 19/10/12 12:00, John Woodard <mail@johnwoodard.co.uk> wrote:

I got this returned

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda count=1 bs=512 | hexdump -s 446 0+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.000170134 s, 0.0 kB/s

Does this mean I'm screwed?

Possibly - you might like to try using ddrescue (standard Ubuntu package) which is a much enhanced version of dd designed to get as much data as possible off a disk. You will need another disk to hold the image file (external USB is probably easiest). From your recovered image file you should then be able to use testdisk to locate the partitions and recover the contents. Good luck (I got all but 12k of my head-crashed disk back a couple of weeks ago). Phil.