NEED HELP ASAP TO RECOVER DATA FROM A CRASHED WINDOWS

[romanempyr]

i m in law school. as everyone knows how crazy law school is, my data is very important to me i.e. with finals around the corner, i need my data ASAP to study for the finals!!!

my windows laptop crashed and i need to get around 5 gigs of data out of my laptop. the data is mostly .doc and pdf files along with some mp3 files. i have an external 300 gigs maxtor usb drive and i would like to transfer all my important data from the laptop to this usb external drive.

i put in the knopix cd and i dont know what to do.

please advise.

thank you in advance.

[Harry Kuhman]

You'll need FAT partitions on that external drive, Linux can't write to NTFS (A little gift from Microsoft).

If you have or make FAT partition space there:
1) Boot Knoppix with the external USB drive attached.

2) See if you have desktop icons for the internal partitions that you need to recover files from (without knowing what happened to the disk there is no way for me to know what happened to the drive or if the partiions are still there).

3) Click on the partitions and see if you can find your needed files.

4) Confirm that you have desktop icons for the external drive and the FAT partition(s) on it.

5) Right click on the external partition icon. Use the actions... sub-menu to make the partition writeable.

6) You can move the files between the partitions any number of ways, including drag and drop.

Give that hardware can fail and Windows will fail and cause exactly this, why would you have no backups?

[romanempyr]

i couldnt make a bakcup bc i was sick the entire week. it is my fault.
my external drive has 300 gigs of ntfs stuff and it has around 100 gigs free.
can i create a fat partition with knopix? how?

[Harry Kuhman]

my external drive has 300 gigs of ntfs stuff and it has around 100 gigs free.
If you mean that you have 300 gigs in NTFS partition but another 100 gigs of unformatted space free, great, but I don't understand why you would leave 100 gigs of space unformatted on a hard drive. If you mean that you have a 300 gig drive and all of it is formatted but 100 gig is unused, then you are not going to be able to use that space for a FAT partition, unless you delete the NTFS partition or have some software that will resize it. Generally this is not the thing that you want to be doing at the same time that you are trying to recover files from a hard drive.

Linux's fdisk should let you make a FAT partition, but I haven't used it very much and can't talk you through it. Since it's an external hard drive I would personally plug it into another Windows system and make the FAT partition there, then put it on the Linux system. But you should be able to do it with Linux formatting tools if you need to; just read the documentation and do a little Googling until you are very comfortable that you will do it corectly.

[romanempyr]

basically i am asking if i can resize my 300 gig partition into 220 lets say and make 80 fat32 for file recovery

[Harry Kuhman]

basically i am asking if i can resize my 300 gig partition into 220 lets say and make 80 fat32 for file recovery
I dod not believe it is safe to do with anything in Linux. I have heard some reports of people trying to do it, and about the same number of corrupted disks as a result. You may have better luck, but I wouldn't risk it.

[rusty]

I'm presuming of course that you can see the files from a knoppix cd booted on your laptop and can access the internet from same. If not please disregard what follows.

There's probably some files that are very important and some you can live without for awhile right? I suggest a quick way to save the important ones is to go to yahoo and/or google and set up email accounts on each, ( 1 gig and two gig space available respectively) and email yourself the important stuff , ie save it here. You can download .docs etc to work on either using knoppix or whatever you get setup with after.

The important thing is not to hose something you can't replace, and since you don't really understand the filesystem issues, you could end up losing everything by playing around with it.

Once you get the hardware and filesystem under control you can move stuff around, In the meantime, look to network ways to store your files for now.

I advise against trying any resizing if your not sure of what your doing.

Good luck!

[romanempyr]

ok i tried booting into knoppix and this is the error that i get : "cannot unite read-only media and initial ramdisk."

what is this? how do i fix it?

[rusty]

The read only media is the cd, the initial ramdisk is the program that loads into ram to operate the computer initially. If the initial ramdisk cannot be loaded or can load but not communicate with the cd then knoppix can't start.

The reasons for this could include a faulty cd (bad burn), a hardware problem (bad memory, a cableing issue)

What happens when you try to boot without the knoppix cd?

Do you get any other messages when you try to boot with the knoppix cd?.

It's possible that the lappy has a hardware problem that's not hard disk related and once that's fixed you'll be able to boot up normally in xp to backup another day.

[Capt. Cautious]

romanempyr,
Like Harry & Rusty both suggested a net backup acct. temporarily should allow you to move the important stuffs off the external drive then I would suggest that you also look at Qparted as well as fdisk for partitioning if you wish to do it from linux. If it were me I'd reformat the drive for 200 &100GB respectively with the 200 NTFS and the 100 VFat. If you can see the files on the crashed drive you can safely move them. Since I tend to be over cautious I Copy, paste then delete as needed after confirming. Yes, it is slow, however it does work and when the files are important I do not take unnecessary chances. I suspect this incident will encourage you to back-up,back-up, and back-up ...
Keep in mind that when Harry or any of the moderators have been there done that and really know their stuff. Anything I might suggest is based only on limited experience but I would not try under any circumstances to try writing to an NTFS partition from Linux. Good Luck let us know how it works out. Do the homework then try it with a file tyou don't care about before moving or manipulating data that is important.
By my hand-I Remain~
Captain Cautious :wink:

[romanempyr]

got everthing back to normal.
thanks alot guys!