Windows crash

[Zeddicus]

I recently had a HD crash on my computer...and to make a long story short. I called Fujitsu for
service and they said I needed to use the re-imaging program to "cure" the situation. I wasn't thrilled
about doing this , but I do have an external HD that I have been pretty good about saving the more important things
to it. However there are some recent additions that I would like to recover...
Anyway, I did use the bootable floppy and went about re-imaging the HD. 49% of the way through it popped up an error.
Now it has to be sent in. Well my warranty expired in December (doesn't that figure) and figure I can replace the old
HD myself....
Several months back I had downloaded Knoppix (3.6) out of curiosity and thought I would make a last ditch effort to try
and see if I could get back some of the files I have lost. I'm getting an error when I try.

Could not mount device
Report error was
Mount: I could not determine the file system type, and none was specified.

I'm guessing there is not much to be done about it, but thought I would ask anyway. On the positive side
I'm really liking this bootable Cd and plan to look into this much further.

Regards,
Zedd

[Harry Kuhman]

...I'm guessing there is not much to be done about it, but thought I would ask anyway.

Knoppix isn't the right tool if, as you attempted, it can't find the partition. You might try the Live Linux CD Helix, as it is made for that kind of thing and has some tools that might help. There are also some partition recovery programs that run under DOS that might help (I'll leave you and Google to work that out).

[styven]

Hi there,

This may help you..........

I recently crashed my pc while playing with linux, partitions etc to the point that i messed up quite a lot and windows would not boot at all. Not good lots of pictures of the kids at risk.

I managed to recsue everything of importance using a knoppix live cd as it let me view the contents of hda1, thios being the windows drive/partition. I burned every thing using KD3.

Re installed windows, partitoned drive for knoppix, now have dual boot.

Steve.

[locutus]

I recently had a HD crash on my computer...and to make a long story short. I called Fujitsu for
service and they said I needed to use the re-imaging program to "cure" the situation. I wasn't thrilled
about doing this , but I do have an external HD that I have been pretty good about saving the more important things
to it. However there are some recent additions that I would like to recover...
Anyway, I did use the bootable floppy and went about re-imaging the HD. 49% of the way through it popped up an error.
Now it has to be sent in. Well my warranty expired in December (doesn't that figure) and figure I can replace the old
HD myself....
Several months back I had downloaded Knoppix (3.6) out of curiosity and thought I would make a last ditch effort to try
and see if I could get back some of the files I have lost. I'm getting an error when I try.

Could not mount device
Report error was
Mount: I could not determine the file system type, and none was specified.

I'm guessing there is not much to be done about it, but thought I would ask anyway. On the positive side
I'm really liking this bootable Cd and plan to look into this much further.

Regards,
Zedd

I'm not sure what the "re-imaging the HD" means but if it attempts to write a raw disk image to the HD and
that failed part way through, you probably have an invalid partition now. One which has some old stuff
and some new stuff and you'll need to learn some really low level disk access and file structure stuff in
order to get anything useful back. Too bad that you didn't use Knoppix before starting to blow it all away
with re-imaging...

One thing of note about the GNU fdisk utility is that it does not distroy partition data. You might be able to
recreate the partition and see if there's anything readable by Knoppix. Before partionMagic and qtparted,
this how I used to reSize partitions to OS testing and multi-OS booting. Risky but pretty much worked all
the time for me except for 2 weeks ago on a WindowsME system. On that system, I could only get about
6GB at the end of the disk and still WinME showed it owned the whole disk while it's dos based fdisk showed
the currect/changed partition sizes.

Good luck.

[peabody]

There are quite a few resources available on the Knoppix CD that will help you out. Knoppix is pretty good at this, though I'll bet there's even better resources out there for this sort of thing in the Linux world.

My first question is whether the File System on the drive was Fat32 or NTFS. My guess is that it was NTFS which is going to make things much more complicated.

The first step is to determine which hard drive/partition the disk is in Linux. If you have a fairly regular system (one "C:" drive), then that's almost always /dev/hda1. However, you've said that Knoppix wouldn't mount the drive and that it couldn't determine the file system type, which means it could be the partition table has gotten corrupted and needs to be fixed.

For that, you can try this utility, which comes on Knoppix.

gpart - Guess Partition

A real useful utility for when mount can't seem to determine the file system type. Gpart does its best to guess the partitions on a drive and fix the partition table. Read the man page thoroughly before using, and note this precaution:

PRECAUTIONS
       gpart may be of some help when the primary partition table was lost  or
       destroyed  but it can under no circumstances replace proper disk/parti‐
       tion table backups.  To save the master boot record (MBR) including the
       primary partition table to a file type

              dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr bs=512 count=1

       exchanging /dev/hda with the block device name of the disk in question.
       This should be done for all disks in the system. To restore the primary
       partition table without overwriting the MBR type

              dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446

       Warning:  make sure that all parameters are typed as shown and that the
       disk device is correct. Failing to do so may result in severe  filesys‐
       tem  corruption. The saved file should be stored in a safe place like a
       floppy disk.

I have to confess I haven't used the utility myself, so you may need to hit the chat rooms or the mailing lists for some assitance.

dd_rescue

This can be used to completely image your hard drive. You'll probably need to go buy that other hard drive you've been talking about for this. Using dd_rescue, you should be able to completely image the filesystem on the disk and then mount it via a loopback and see if you can recover everything. Again I haven't used this, but I know it can be used to image that drive.

badblocks

You can also try the "badblocks" command if you can get the partition rescued to determine if there are any bad blocks on that hard drive. If there are it's definitely time to scrap that drive.

You might try surfin' the net and hitting the freenode.net chat rooms to see if there's anyone out there in Linux land with some data recovery expertise. Good luck man. You'll need it.