I'm glad to hear you recovered your data! Yes, I will build the 8.10 release in a few days.

It's taking longer because there are a few changes which make the work to build the image take a little more time than I had planned for.

As for the packages that will ship, the changes are mostly trivial, so there is nothing extraordinary about the 8.10 release when compared to 8.04. I will release an 8.10 version, though.

On another note, if the "I" were "we", then maybe We could have released on time... As usual, any help is appreciated.

Last night I successfully used the 8.04 rescue remix CD and ddrescue to recover my wife's precious files and outlook folders off a failed WD400EB 40GB drive. Before finding your site yesterday afternoon I had received quotes of $600-$800+ from companies to recover the data. My wife was seriously thinking she would have to live without her genealogy files, her photos, her life history, and her 700MB of old emails.

I had already bought a WD400EB off eBay for $25 thinking that the PCB was bad but I discovered on Friday last week that the problem was not with the circuit board. I was seriously considering trying to swap the heads myself and managed to kill the eBay drive in the process of investigating that possibility. A fellow on the deadharddrive.com forums told me that he thought my disk had a bad head and that I needed professional help to the tune of $700.

Fortunately, yesterday afternoon I stumbled across ubuntu-rescue-remix-org. I'm not even sure how I found your site. I had read about ddrescue last week but when I tried to boot into my Ubuntu partition on my laptop on Friday I discovered that my recent 8.10 update had messed up the install. As soon as I got home from work I put the 40GB drive back in the desktop case along with the 160GB drive that had been in there. I downloaded your ISO to my laptop and burned a CD. After booting up the CD on my main computer I followed the instructions here: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery.

It only took around an hour or so and ddrescue had created a 40GB image file on the NTFS partition on my 160GB drive and it was on the third phase where it retries reading bad blocks. I decided to see what it had recovered so I terminated the process with Ctrl+C. Again using the DataRecover help docs I mounted the image file and began copying all my wife's files (and my files) from the mounted image to a directory on the 160GB drive.

After putting the 160GB drive in an external drive case attached to my laptop I opened the Outlook pst file and checked a few folders and emails. Everything there looked fine. I also opened up several PDFs, Word docs, and images and everything I checked looked great. Tonight I will do a more thorough inspection but at this point I am ecstatic! Thank you so much for providing this great set of tools in an easy to use package.

John Hansen