I have a VAIO VGN-SZ2M/B which a customer has passed me in order to get their files off.

Originally XP Home, which will no longer boot. I have booted it into 12.04 from CD temporarily - I plan on running Ubuntu on it eventually, after I've removed the customer's files from it. Installed 3GB of ram instead of the 512M which was actually there, and it's been running fine the past couple of days.

(Including mounting the two hard drive partitions multiple times, and copying between them - this is relevant below)

Today my customer supplied me with a 1TB WD USB hard drive, to copy user files (about 20G) onto.

Since then. the two local hard drive partitions have failed to mount up. If I launch the file browser, I see the partitions, but if I try and mount one up, the HD activity light goes on and stays on. Similar if I mount from disk utility, or from the command line. Same seems to apply if I boot without the USB drive attached, so it's not that causing interrupt problems.

Going in from the terminal gives a long delay before being able to CD to a mounted partition, and won't let me ls the directory - it reports "I/O Error". Using ps seems to indicate that mount.nfs may be hanging. But I don't know enough to tell.

Apologies for a slightly wooley definition, but I've never seen a machine do this before, and I've put Ubuntu on to quite a few different platforms, especially over the last few months. I accept the drive is possibly on the way out, and needs a reformat (it reports a few bad sectors in disk utility), but need to get these files off before I do anything else.

I've tried booting from both CD and thumb drive.

Any pointers, gratefully received.