partition recovery

[nimsey]

I have read lots of good things abot Knoppix and I am currently in the process of downloading it. I hope it will help my problem. Let me know if you think it will and if you have any suggestions.

My PCs hard drive is lost.... I am trying to recover it. Most of my friends are Mac users.

I bought another (internal) hard drive and was trying to install it. It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer (with a drive letter). I tried putting the jumper on it to make sure that it was reading as a slave drive but that didnt make a difference(yes, the power was off). during this process I got the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death! I get a split second BSOD. then it goes to a screen saying windows could not start. It will not let me start in ANY mode. when it shows the start up log it hangs up on Windows/system32/drivers/iomdisk.sys. i can boot with boot floppy but it will only read the C drive partition with the HP restore files on it. I cannot access the D drive partition which has WINDOWS. I even tried taking out the old hard drive and making it a slave on my husband's machine. No luck there either.

I have tried to use the HP restore cds that came with my computer but it will not let me use them and says that I can only use these disks on a HP machine (which I am) and to contact HP support ( I am waiting for a return email).
I looked online regarding iomdisk.sys and it seem like it is my external zip drive driver that is causing a memory allocation issue. Others it seems have had this problem and they have just gone in and deleted the iomdisk.sys file and the computer started. However I cannot get to my D partition. DAMN IOMEGA and that blasted zip drive. I am going to go smash it with a hammer in the driveway. I had just kept it around because I had some files on Zips. I just took them off the zips and burned a DVD last week of just about ALL my necessary files but I just want my hard drive back!!! BTW. I unplugged the 2nd hard drive as soon as BSOD happened.

do you think that by using knoppix I might get to see the missing partition so that I can retrive my files and possibly delete the offending driver?

[Harry Kuhman]

I bought another (internal) hard drive and was trying to install it. It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer (with a drive letter). I tried putting the jumper on it to make sure that it was reading as a slave drive but that didnt make a difference.....

Lots of issues here:

First of all, did you try booting into Knoppix and see if you could view the files that Windows couldn't get to before adding the new hard drive?

Second, Knoppix usually is used to recover windows files when Windows can't boot at all. You're statement that "It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer" implies that you are (or at least were) able to boot windows fine after the files were "lost". In such a case Knoppix may not be of much help.

Third, it may well be (based on what you typed) that you didn't see the drive under My Computer (with a drive letter) because you had not partitioned the drive. One or more partitions must be created on the drive and then you must reboot before you see drive letters. You then need to format the partitions before you can save files to them. If you do partition and then format the drive (which can be done from Windows as well as from Linux), do not make NTFS partitions if you want to write to them from Knoppix, make some type of FAT partitions.

Forth, I'm not clear on what you have done with the jumpers. The new drive needs to be jumpered as a slave if it is on the same cable as the old drive (which should be jumpered as a master) and cable select is not in use. If the drive is on a different IDE connector as the other drive then it needs to be master if it is the only drive on that connector and slave if it is the second drive and the other drive is jumpered as master (and you are not using CS) . It does sound like your jumpering was right but when you changed the jumper it went wrong. Also be aware that many Western Digital Drives for some crazy reason need to be jumpered differently when they are the only drive on the cable than when they are the master drive of a pair, so often adding a drive when you alrady have a WD drive requires changing a jumper on the WD drive too.

Fifth, Linux often demands more properly configured hardware than Windows, so be sure the master/slave jumpers are correct for Knoppix even if Windows seems to wok.

Finally, while Knoppix may not help much in this case (only a guess based on the above), other live CD's like Helix might.

[UnderScore]

I bought another (internal) hard drive and was trying to install it. It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer (with a drive letter)

When you buy a HD it has nothing on it so it will _not_ show up in the My Computer. Yout must use the Windows Disk Management utility (Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative tools -> Computer Managment -> Disk Management) to first partition the HD to give it a drive letter. Then it can be formatted.

[nimsey]

i got knoppix to work and to see my missing partition. i got my files off the partition and i am now trying to remove the driver that is causing windows to hang up. it is a ntfs partition and i mounted it according the "knoppix hacks" book. it still wont let me delete the problem driver....