Need to recover data from crashed notebook

[Angryguy]

I have a Dell Latitude D505 system. As of Friday, the computer will no longer boot, reporting a disk error [I'll leave it at that, rather then going off on a long rant about this and other problems I'm having on this barely 2-month-old notebook]. Before I send it back to Dell for replacement, I'm tryign whatever I can to attempt to recover some files from it - namely a month's worth of classnotes I've been taking on the computer and never backed up, along with a few other misc. files that I'd rather not lose.

I've played with Knoppix in the past (version 3.3 I think), and have since moved on to a full Gentoo 64-bit-Linux installation on my desktop, and was wondering if Knoppix might provide a way for me to access my data and back it up somehow.

Are there any tools for Knoppix that might be able to recover data from the drive, assumming that it's even possible for any data to be read off of the drive (all I get from it's diagnostics is a self-test failure)? The notebook runs Windows XP Home with the standard NTFS file system (which I know that Linux has never been very good at interacting with). This of course would also assume that I can get the system to boot from a Knoppix CD (haven't tried yet) and either gain network access or mount my flash drive for me to backup the files to (the computer has no cd burner or floppy drive)


Thanks

[Harry Kuhman]

Try booting Knoppix and telling us what you see on the hard drive. No point in people writing up lots of information based on speculation of what you might see when you do this. And all the recovery information has been posted in these forums many times before, you might wan to trry searching a little.

[Angryguy]

I just burned a new copy of Knoppix 3.7, and have gotten the laptop to successfully boot into it (although it was very slow to load the kernel). I am impresed btw with all of the improvements that I see in it already over the old 3.3 version (last one that I had used).


I noticed a utility there to view an NTFS partition, however it requires authentic winows drivers. I obviously can't get them off off of the drive however, and downloading brings me to a second issue. Knoppix apparently doesn't recognize the notebook's wireless NIC - the Dell TrueMobile 802.11a/b card I believe - so I've got no net access. I'm goign to try plugging it directly into the router and see if I can get net working that way, although I'll have to unplug my desktop in order to do so (I unfortunately don't have any extra ethernet cables handy)

I tried accessing qtparted (as root) to see what partitions the system can see, however the program just freezes/hangs. Opening outside of root gives the "no device found" message, so I'm guessing this freezing means that it isn't able to access the drive.

Any other ideas on what I can try? Or is this a hopeless endeavor :(

[Harry Kuhman]

I noticed a utility there to view an NTFS partition, however it requires authentic winows drivers....(
I don't know what utility you are looking at. My Knoppix (3.7 as well as all since 3.1, the first I used) can see the NTFS partition on my laptop just fine. Can't write to an NTFS partition safely, but no problem reading one.

Yea, you should always have an extra network cable or two around. Some places over charge for them, but from many vendors they are quite inexpensive. I always carry one with my notebook whenever I take it anywhere too, it can be very handy to be able to jack in to an ethernet port. Knoppix wireless support is still not great (mostly the fault of chip and card manufacturers who keep the workings of the devices secret and only release windows drivers).

If the partitions are lost you might look at the gpart utility that can try to figure out what partitions were on the disk and revreate them. See man gpart.

[Angryguy]

Thanks for the quick reply.

The NTFS utility I'm talking about is on the menu: Knoppix->Utilities->Capture NTFS. Now that I look at it again, it looks like it might be just a driver utility and not much else though.

I've been meaning to get a spare ethernet cable for a while, but haven't been able to find one at a decent price yet that'd be suitable for keeping in my laptop case.

Knoppix is also giving me some error about an invalid mode being specified when I boot it. The different modes (0-9) seem to correspond to different RowxColumn settings. Just pressing space to continue works fine though, and given that I'm just using this for recovery I guess it doesn't reallt matter.


gpart runs for a minute or two, then reports a "Fatal Error: cannot get sector size on dev:/dev/hda"

Looks like it is a complete mechanical failure of this drive, in my barely 2-month-old notebook computer. Unless you have any other ideas that I can try, I guess I'll just call up and arrange to send the whole thing back to Dell for service and deal with the loss of nearly all of my class notes from my comp sci. classes, among other things. Thanks again for trying.

[foamrotreturns]

have you tried just mounting the hdd the old fashioned way?
mkdir /mnt/hda1
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

If it won't even mount, you are probably looking at either a partition corrupition (which can be fixed) or a hardware failure (a lot harder to fix).