Klaus K's advice from debian-list

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Glen Millard:

Knoppix 6.2 and Windows XP quagmire

......and I don't mean the pervert from 'Family Guy' either!

Okay, so I have an XP Pro install and I am getting the BSOD (big surprise).
I want to see if I can at *least* recover my data on the disk and then I
am going to wipe it and put something else on there (Ubuntu, Debian,
Fedora) which I have been meaning to do for quite some time.

So, I have Knoppix 6.2 and I was able to boot with it. Now I am having
trouble identifying the hard drive. In the 'dmesg' output, I can see :
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps but I cannot see the drive in the device list.

So, how would I identify the drive and mount it so I can at least get
all of my important stuff off of there before I send XP back to that
Great Gig In The Sky?

Thanks

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Klaus Knopper:

Hello Mr. Millard,

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 02:13:23PM -0400, Glen Millard wrote:
> ...and I don't mean the pervert from 'Family Guy' either!
>
> Okay, so I have an XP Pro install and I am getting the BSOD (big
> surprise).
> I want to see if I can at *least* recover my data on the disk and then I
> am going to wipe it and put something else on there (Ubuntu, Debian,
> Fedora) which I have been meaning to do for quite some time.
>
> So, I have Knoppix 6.2 and I was able to boot with it. Now I am having
> trouble identifying the hard drive. In the 'dmesg' output, I can see :
> ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps but I cannot see the drive in the device list.


Usually, it should at least appear in

cat /proc/parttions

as sda, sda1, sda2, ...

If not, the harddisk controller may be unsupprted. Knoppix 6.2 is
probably older than your computer, I would recommend trying 6.4.4 or
6.5 which have never kernels and hardware support.

> So, how would I identify the drive and mount it so I can at least get
> all of my important stuff off of there before I send XP back to that
> Great Gig In The Sky?


The filemanager should show your harddisk as "sda1" on the left side. If it doesn't, the partition table of the drive may just be broken, please check if you at least see "sda" (the entire disk) in /proc/partitions.

If you see the disk, you can repartition with "sudo fdisk /dev/sda", or
try to recover the old partition table by "sudo testdisk".

Hope this helps.

Regards
-Klaus Knopper