Hard Drive no longer mounts

[wfran123]

I have a hard drive which has failed and I am attempting to recover some files prior to replacing the HD. I made a bootable CD and was able to get Knoppix to load successfully. It recognized my HD (both partitions) and my USB external drive. I copied a couple of files over and it appeared to be working well. I had to stop and shut-down, however, after starting this process. Now when I load Knoppix again, it does not recognize the partitions as it did previously. It only shows the "c" drive. This drive will not mount or open. The message is something along the lines of not being able to recognize the file system and one is not designated.

Any idea if there are other options I can try to gain access to these files again?

Thanks.

[kaspare]

If you have important files to recover you should buy an HD of the same size o bigger than the broken one and instead to try to mount the partitions make a bitstream copy of the whole HD with ddrescue.

AFTER that you can try to:

fix the mbr with testdisk if you have an mbr problem
repair the filesystem with fsck.xxx if you have a problem with the filesystem (gparted can do that, even with ntfs, and as a gui).
recover files with foremost, scalpel, photorec

It is important to leave the faulty HD unplugged until you have the new one for the copy.


Cheers

Max

[wfran123]

Max,

Thank you for the reply and ideas.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the best way for me to connect/access my broken HD once I replace it with a new one?
Can I make the bitstream copy of the hard-drive like you are suggesting to an external storage drive?

I should have provided more information previously - I am using a Toshiba Satellite P25-S477 laptop with WinXP.

Thank you.

[kaspare]

Max,

Thank you for the reply and ideas.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the best way for me to connect/access my broken HD once I replace it with a new one?
Can I make the bitstream copy of the hard-drive like you are suggesting to an external storage drive?

I should have provided more information previously - I am using a Toshiba Satellite P25-S477 laptop with WinXP.

Thank you.

Hi,

hd adaptors are cheap you can by one according to your hd model (ide or sata) an plug it in a desktop computer, better to connect it directly to the desktop motherboard without an usb/sata/ide converter.
Then you can boot the desktop pc with knoppix and make the bitstream copy in the desktop pc's hd with ddrescue.
If the desktop pc's hd is too small or there isn't enought room you can buy/land another hd (ide/sata), connect to the desktop pc' motherboard a make the copy there. (Just to be extra safe you can disconnect the desktop pc's original hd).
Onother way could be an external box usb/firewire or a nas. I think the safest way is the first one, see the this post:
:
http://www.nabble.com/ddrescue-and-netcat-cryptcat-to9360272.html#a9360272

If you want to make other copies of the bitstream image (this could be a good idea..) remember to produce an md5sum of the original copy and check that the other copy has the same md5 ( md5sum image_file > md5sum.xt ), after the copy ( for not to stress the hd before you have the clone..) you can try to make an md5sum of the hd too ( md5sum /dev/xxx).