IDE hard drive failure

[Paladin <paladin@netcabo.pt>]

Hi,

One of my drives (the least important, thank God!) failled recently.
Since I can't afford taking it to some company that recovers data I
was thinking of using software to try to recover the best I could.
I found a very good program named my_rescue that does some of the dd
work, but if it founds a bad cluster skips it a continues to get the
rest of the data. It also saves the status of it's work so you can
try at a latter time to recover that data that you didn't get the
first time. The problem now is that BIOS doesn't always recognize
the drive. :/
And that brings me to the question:

Do you know of any program that allows access to a drive bypassing
the BIOS?

BTW, would you recommend RAID5 using an entire disk and two
partitions of another? (If it's even possible to do that...)


Thanks everyone,

---
Paladin