External HD Corrupted in Knoppix. AH!

[tev]

So, I was doing a recovery of a drive on my desktop using my external HD, and at the end of the copy process, Konqueror gave me a bunch of cannot copy errors.

Now Windows can't read the drive and says it is corrupted, and Knoppix can do a 'dirty' mount.

Can I fix the drive? Its really important data. eeeek.

[Harry Kuhman]

Is this external drive formatted in the NTFS format? If so Knoppix can't safely write to it. Yea, some people claim it can, but this is what happens.

If you reformat the external drive as FAT you can likely save the files to it again safely. As with windows it's important to shut down or unmount the drive before disconnecting it. And if you had anything else on that external drive that you "need", sorry but I know of no way to recover it.

[tev]

I'm actually not sure what the external is formatted in but I can still mount it and read it in linux, its just that in windows... nothing.

I think I'll try to get another external drive and copy the files to that in linux. Is that a advisable plan?

It seems like the file structure is still there.

[Harry Kuhman]

That's not the worst plan in the world, but if the new drive is formatted NTFS this may happen again. Here's a better plan: If you have another system (or a friend with another system), install an FTP server on that system. Network that system to the bad system with Knoppix. Transfer the files across the network to the other system by FTP, using Konquror under Knoppix as the FTP client.

[TopFarmer]

I would run 'testdisk' and under advanced option use recover boot record.