code_orange
10-16-2006, 03:23 AM
A computer in our house had crashed "randomly" after attempting to load an application. On reboot, Windows reported that system files were missing. This is the second time this problem has happened in about two years (first time was fixed by repairing the windows install with the recovery cd), but the recovery cd wasn't available this time, so I tried to fix a couple things, which led to the computer not being able to find 'ntldr.' Also, the recovery console displayed only 3 files in the whole filesystem afterwards.
I loaded Knoppix in order to look at the NTFS filesystem on the hard drive, but I only see about 50 gibberish files scattered in the root folder. The mount command shows the hard drive mounted as 'vfat,' but any attempt to modify it results in "the device is busy." qtparted shows the drive containing an unknown partition format. TestDisk shows only 730 MB on the hard drive, despite the hard drive containing around 160 GB maximum capacity. fdisk -l doesn't display anything. Any ideas on how to recover this hard drive?
I loaded Knoppix in order to look at the NTFS filesystem on the hard drive, but I only see about 50 gibberish files scattered in the root folder. The mount command shows the hard drive mounted as 'vfat,' but any attempt to modify it results in "the device is busy." qtparted shows the drive containing an unknown partition format. TestDisk shows only 730 MB on the hard drive, despite the hard drive containing around 160 GB maximum capacity. fdisk -l doesn't display anything. Any ideas on how to recover this hard drive?