NTFS recovery help

[HunterOtobe]

I recently tried to start up my windows system and was greeted with a Disk read error. I am now running Knoppix and trying to see if there is anything i can do about said error, or possibly recover some of the data from the troublesome disk. I am relatively new to Linux though, so any help would be appreciated.

I see three hard drive icons on my desktop (there were only two partitions that I knew of in windows but I assume the third must be some recovery partition or such) all of which give the following error when I click on them:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
Error reading bootsector: Input/output error
Failed to startup volume: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/hdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is inconsistent. Run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot it TWICE!
The usage of the /f parameter is very IMPORTANT! No modification was
made to NTFS by this software.

I have also tried testdisk and gpart with the following results:

testdisk: error while loading shared libraries: libntfs.so.9: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

gpart hdb1
*** Fatal error: cannot get sector size on dev(hdb1).

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[johnrw]

It sounds like you have some real drive problems. Maybe hardware. Maybe the drive's cable is loose.
I would start by making sure the cable is plugged ALL the way in... on the drive and the motherboard end.

If that doesn't improve your situation... I would remove the drive and plug it into another "known good" computer... as a slave drive.
That computer should have the same OS installed as you have on that drive. Ie XP SP2 any form of home or pro. Boot up and have Windows check the drive's partitions.

This site (http://www.updatexp.com/windows-xp-chkdsk.html) has a good enough guide on using windows to repair partitions. But using Knoppix to repair a filesystem is misguided. You can recover data from a drive that is "mountable," but if Knoppix tells you to use your original OS... then you should go ahead along those lines.