Error when accessing HDD (Windows guy wants to switch! Grr!)

[Samuraiken]

Sorry for the sob story, but i'm fairly certain that Knoppix is my last chance to reclaim four years of very hard memories...skip to the bottom if you don't want to read me spilling my guts.

So, i bought this external USB drive a few years back...i think it was one of the first 250gb "MyBooks" that were out. Anyway, i had been using this thing for a long time, until suddenly around August 2008 it went and flopped. And not only did THIS disk die, but my other external 250gb USB drive ended up dying as well. So fast forward 6 months and i still haven't been able to get any of the data off. i want to burn it to DVD, but../shrug...the damned thing just won't work.

And here's my problem. It has all of my family photos from the past four years (basically, the "beginning" of my family, as that's when i got married...so it's got all ultrasounds from my two miscarriages, the baby pictures from my daughter, when my family flew to japan to visit us on her first birthday, etc). The other one has a bunch of stuff that (grudingly) is replaceable. Why did two external drives just up and die on me within the same small time period of a week? No idea. I was using one at work, and one at home, and i'm just out of options.

I've run "HDD Recovery" program (that's the name) in Windows and it found and then fixed two "errors", but i'm still unable to get it going.

The one that i'm mainly concerned about is a SATA drive (not ESATA...just a SATA drive in a USB2 housing). So i unplugged my primary hard drive with windows on it, popped in this "external" sata drive (after ripping it out of the housing bay thingy they come in), ripped knoppix to a dvd and went to town.

long story short:
i get this -

Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure

I can SEE the drive in the PCman file browser (shows up as "The Bottomless Pit", so it can read the drive volume label, i guess), but i get that error every time i try to click on the drive itself to get at the data.

This is closer than i've gotten before...in windows the machine just hangs up while "My Computer" tries to read the disk, and then says it's unaccessable.

Anyway, if anyone can help, i'm willing to make a decent paypal donation if it works :)
There aren't any PC repair shops around here, and most of my experience is developing for windows machines and building networks...not for recovering data from metal.

[rusty]

Difficult situation.

A couple questions:

Does the drive make any clicking sounds when operating?

If you put it back in its USB enclosure and plug it in does Knoppix detect it?

If you open a root shell and type: fdsisk -l , what is the output?

There are a some data recovery tools available in Linux that might be helpful, but if the drive was formatted NTFS it will make it harder to recover if it is possible at all.

Take a look at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Main_Page.

[Samuraiken]

Thanks Rusty.

When you said "If you open a root shell and type: fdsisk -l , what is the output? ", i'm not exactly sure how to do that. I'm using Knoppix 6.1.0 (or 6.0.1...sorry, it's been a few hours since i burned it to disk and i forgot to label it), so when you said to open up a root terminal, i clicked the Terminal Emulator in the bottom left hand side of the screen on the toolbar. was this correct?

Shortly after i posted the original messege, i ran into TestDisk (which you linked above, no less ;p ). It works like a charm as far as getting into the disk, listing the folders and files and whatnot...

but i'm not exactly sure how to recover the data (or even which to use, TestDisk or PhotoRec...one would assume they do the same thing?).

Here's my dilema as far as hardware concerns though.
- Apparently in the last 6 months, the power supply for the USB enclosure has ninja vanished. I do, however, have a used Hewlet Packard laptop power supply in my Box O' Wires....so i'm assuming at some point in the past, someone made a mix up (i don't own any HP machines...go figure). So sadly, i can't use the enclosure until i find another power supply that fits (already went through the house in loops...nothing fit so far!)

- my PC has both IDE and SATA slots, and i have plenty of IDE cables, and SATA cables, but the SATA "power cable" (the smaller of the two) i only have one of. Which means...i either use it to boot into windows with my GOOD drive, or use it to boot into knoppix via DVD and mount the broken SATA drive.

It'll be a few days before i get to the store to either pick up another power supply for the enclosure, or grab another SATA power cable (probably the latter since it's cheaper).

So, aside from all the problems that i'm having (listed above...i'm losing hair and my head hurts ...lol), i find myself in booting into Knoppix with a CD, running TestDisk, seeing my files...and being UNABLE to copy them into a WORKING USB external drive (which i have). Something about knoppix not being able to write to NTFS partitions, etc? The (working) drive has data on it, which i could always boot into windows, copy to my primary drive so as to empty out the working USB drive, go BACK to knoppix and start copying away...but testdrive/knoppix aren't letting me do anything to the working drive itself (which is NTFS).

So i've been spending the past few hours trying to find new and interesting ways to get this data off of the (bad) drive and onto the (good) usb drive, using knoppix. It would be a breeze if i had that extra SATA power cable so i could boot into windows and use the Windows version of TestDisk...but alas, i think the board only came with one anyway.

My apologies if it got confusing...as you can see i've been VERY unprepared for all of this. It also doesn't help that there are no PC shops within a good range of me, at least none that carry anything more than games/music rentals.




But hey, if you know how to copy from a broken NTFS drive to a working NTFS drive while using Knoppix running TestDisk/PhotoRec, please let me know. I'm sure i'll find it on google, but i haven't had any luck so far.


(by the way...i absolutely dispise Iceweasel as a browser >< wish it came with Firefox!)

[Samuraiken]

Oh, i forgot to answer one of the questions you asked:

If it's in the enclosure, it did make clicking noises (both drives did, but alas, the SATA drive doesn't have a power cable for it's enclosure...the working IDE external has one of those retarded "built in" power cables that's wired to the enclosure itself).

But while it's been sitting here in the PC, it hasn't clicked yet (although, the "working" USB external that i'm trying to copy files TO makes clicking noises everytime TestDisk starts analyzing it...lol).


man o man...i'm going to spend more time learning how to live without my windows games and visual studio, etc...and just learn PHP and try to get a job converting from ASP to PHP...windows is just too much of a headache for something we actually pay for.

[Samuraiken]

Woot!

Well after fiddling with this for about 6 hours, i just happened to run into my next door neighbor, who "just happened" to need me to come over and fix something that his wife had messed up on their Vista install.

I also noticed that he was running two SATA drives.

And i managed to get him to agree to let me pilfer one of the power cables since they were done using the PC for the night (returning it tomorrow morning, of course...still gotta go buy my own ;p ).

I got my photos back :) yay. Now to quickly burn them to DVD and then upload them to my web site for a backup of the backup (and then burn another dvd to mail it to my family in the states, for good measure!).

cheers all. Knoppix is a lifesaver (not to mention TestDisk being so much better than the proprietary software i've been trying over the past few months).

[OErjan]

yes indeed, knoppix has saved many important files from dead installs, not to mention the memtest that it has built in has helped me diagnose faults on number of occasions.

[Samuraiken]

I think what i'll be doing tonight is wiping everything on the PC now that i have it all backed up, and then partition my 250gb drive to 125/125 split between Windows and Ubuntu (i hear it's the "easiest" to learn at the moment?). Wish i could totally get rid of Windows, but with my profession leading me towards my MCSE, using anything other than Windows at home would just put me behind the curve when it comes to staying on top of things for work (sadly).

But hell, everything other than work and a few rarely played games, i'm moving it all to Ubuntu after the download is done.

Not to mention..it's just one less set of licenses i have to keep track of :)

[OErjan]

I strongly reccomend this, install XP FIRST and on the first partition leave the other untouched and empty.then install ubuntu, this will make them both boot, if you start with linux hen do windows only windows will boot...

also let Linux have 3 partitions / , swap and /home, making it 4 PRIMARY partitions total (max that is advisable for several reasons).
/ shoulfd be say 5-6G
swap say 1024M
/home the rest, most user files (mail, bookmarks, desktop, files, configurations...) are saved there, there are some saved in /tmp and /var,
/tmp is temporary files, and no separate partition needed usually
/var is logfiles and such (also mail and web stuff if you run a mail or web server) same here no separqte partition needed usually.

reason I recommend a separate /home is that you can wipe the / partition and reinstall keeping everything on /home intact and usually working after a reinstall, most things should works even if you wipe / and install another linux version (as long as you use same programs)