[Cialug] Failing disk, spinrite partial recovery.

[Kendall Bailey]

I set my brother up with Ubuntu 6.06 a while back.  Suddenly the boot
up sequence started to fail to mount the root partition.  He ran
spinrite at multiple levels and while it initially flagged a few block
unrecoverable, it now says everything is clean.  The boot sequence now
gets past mounting but says it "failed to connect to the tty" or
something like that.  He's in St. Louis so I can't see the screen.  It
drops him into a root shell before mounting the /home partition.
There's not much I can suggest for him to do.  Even things like dmesg
don't run at this point.  I've mailed him an Ubuntu 7.10 disk since he
lost the last one I gave him.  Any suggestions short of an OS
reinstall?  Should he keep using this hdd, or does a failure of this
type typically spell doom for the drive as a whole?  I'm hoping he'll
get his /home partition safely backed up once we can boot off a CD...

Thanks.
Kendall