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fyall
11-21-2008, 11:01 AM
My WD My Book will not mount properly, it spins up no problem and is recognised as a local drive by XP but when I try to open it I am asked if I want to format it and cannot access the files which I desperately need to access. I booted up using Knoppix but again it sees the drive but when I try to access it I get the error message that it is an unknown file format. Is there any way using knoppix I can access the drive to get the files off? I am new to Linux so please be patient if I ask questions :oops: . Thanks in advance.
OErjan
11-21-2008, 01:27 PM
if you start knoppix it is a chance that you will see a icon on the desktop allowing you to see the files.

backing things up should be failry easy after that if you have a burner (other drive than the one knoppix CD/DVD is in). just start a porgram called k3b (KIIIB) and burn.

or fit a fat formatted USB disk (pendrive...) to the linux system, i will never consider NTFS safe, it even fails fairly frequently under windows.
fyall
11-21-2008, 01:34 PM
yes I can see the drive in knoppix but when I try to access it I get the message 'cannot open unrecognized file format'.
rusty
11-21-2008, 03:20 PM
If neither xp or Knoppix will read it, there's a good chance the disk has been damaged either physically or magnetically. While there are tools available in linux that may be helpful for recovering data , learning about them will take awhile, especially if you haven't used the command line interface.

You might want to look at some commercial products, for example Spin Rite.

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
fyall
11-22-2008, 10:30 AM
I have tried using testdisk and it does see the partition but cannot access or repair it due to a read error after about 87% of the scan. What would be the best data recovery software that I could try for file retrieval? Spinrite is one I have been told about but HDD regenerator is another one.
rusty
11-22-2008, 03:03 PM
Maybe you can find something here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery

HTH
fyall
11-23-2008, 06:35 PM
:D :D Success, I have managed to rebuild the boot sector with testdisk! I have all my info back, thanks for all who helped.