Cannot mount hard drive

[flowergardener]

I am a newbie and have some problems mounting a hard drive. My first attempt running Knoppix from the CD worked fine. The drives mounted and I was able to see the folders. After some more testing and rebooting I now get the error:

"Could not mount device. The reported error was:
Mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, or too many mounted file systems."

Some of the things I did on previous sessions:

1. Marked drives as Read/Write
2. Attempt to setup LISA with the Wizard
3. Downloaded a file from the Internet into the tmp folder

[Harry Kuhman]

What types of partitions and what version of Windows do you think that you have out there on the hard drive? If you still have Windows installed, can it boot and mount the partitions?

[flowergardener]

Thanks for the quick response.

This laptop is a Compaq Presario running Windows Home. My client owns this laptop and picked up a virus a couple of days ago which wiped out the C: drive directory. I am trying to use Knoppix to recover some files to another PC on my network and then reinstall Windows.

Because there is no directory the boot sequence cannot find any files and hangs with a screen full of warnings about missing files.

I thought I was in luck with Knoppix but since I am just learning how to use it I must have done something wrong and now it will not mount the hard drives. Prior to this I was getting the full file names of everything on the hard drive and was ready to grab some files.

I tried to hook up an external drive to the USB port but it did not recognize it. Then on reboot to try something else I got the mount error.

I hope I haven't accidently written over the hard drive when I set it to Read/Write.

[Harry Kuhman]

Some of the things I did on previous sessions:
1. Marked drives as Read/Write
2. Attempt to setup LISA with the Wizard
....

This laptop is a Compaq Presario running Windows Home. My client owns this laptop and picked up a virus a couple of days ago which wiped out the C: drive directory. I am trying to use Knoppix to recover some files to another PC on my network and then reinstall Windows.
...
I thought I was in luck with Knoppix but since I am just learning how to use it I must have done something wrong and now it will not mount the hard drives. Prior to this I was getting the full file names of everything on the hard drive and was ready to grab some files.

...Then on reboot to try something else I got the mount error.

I hope I haven't accidently written over the hard drive when I set it to Read/Write.

By "Windows Home" I am guessing that you mean XP home. As you didn't say otherwise I'll conclude that it has the default NTFS partitions for XP rather than FAT.

Linux cannot safely write to NTFS partitions. This is apparently by Microsoft's design and something they are going to a lot of work to maintain. Knoppix by default mounts them read only. I'm unsure how you were able to make the partitions read-write as most users report that Knoppix will not let them do this at all; but if you really did so and wrote to the disk you most likely destroyed any information that was left. Why you would try installing Lisa and downloading files from the Internet when what you now say you wanted to do was recover data from an already flakey system isn't at all clear, but it does sound like you had access to all the files but now the NTFS partition has been ruined.

[flowergardener]

Yes. The OS is Windows XP Home with NTFS.

I tried installing LISA because Knoppix said I needed to run LISA in order to access my network. Then I set the drives to Read/Write thinking I could rename some of the files and find them from Windows. Silly me. I did not realize that this would be a problem.

Since your message someone said to try SAMBA which I did. This attempted to set up the drive as shared. Now the hard drives don't show up at all in Knoppix.

[Harry Kuhman]

Now the hard drives don't show up at all in Knoppix.

Yes. As I understand it, even though Windows XP frequently fails in the way that you described, Microsoft is going to extradonary lengths to be sure that Linux cannot safely write to NTFS partitions. People have tried some things, such as captive NTFS using the NTFS drives from Windows, but I guess that thanks to service pack "updates" Microsoft has been able to keep even this from working. There are techniques that we use to recover files from a Windows system when Windows no longer boots, but I know of no way to recover the data now that you have written to the partition with Linux.

You and your client don't want to hear this right now, but this is not completely unexpected when running an OS like XP that is well known to just suddenly refuse to boot or access it's own files, and not having good backups. Windows is not ready for the desktop.