Harddrive, sda, problems.

[Roberth]

I am trying to safe some files on my harddrive, with knoppix 4.0, because win xp won't boot up cuz a file is missing or corrupted. But I am a total newbe on knoppix and linux. I have searched around the forum and tested a lot, but nothing has worked.

I have two harddrives one each 74gb and one extern USB 200gb disk. On the desktop in knoppix I can se, CD-ROM, Floppy, KNOPPIX.desktop, sda, sdb, sdc1 and trash.desktop. I can start and se the files in sdc1, that is the USB harddrive. But when I'm going to open the other harddrives, sda and sdb, it says that "Could not mount device. The reported error was: mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified". I need to get files from the harddrive and move them to the USB drive so I can format the harddrive.

Is there someone that have any suggestion on what I can do to get the harddrives mounted?

Thanks!

[Harry Kuhman]

There are certainly things that can happen to a file system that damages the partition enough that it can't be opened, and unfortunately this sounds like what my have happened to you.

Do you have any insight on what happened to your system that caused this? Unfortunately with XP it does happen all to often with no clue as to why, but if you have any insight on something that caused this it might help us a lot in giving you advice.

Are the partitions NTFS or are they FAT? There are a lot of good tools for recovering data from FAT partitions, much fewer tools, at least freely available ones, for NTFS.

If you can't access the partitions with Knoppix you ight want to look into the Live Linux CD Helix, which is a data forensic disk and has more tools for poking into partitions than Knoppix. There are also some non-Linux bootable recovery tools that may help you.

Learning about the structure of the partition table in the MBR might be another step that would appeal to you. As you learn the meaning of each bit in the partition table entries you should be able to examine the partition table entries and see if it's something simple in the partition table that might be editd, or something more deeply hidden withing the file structure itself that is causing this.

[Roberth]

Thanks for the answer.

I have no insight on how it might have happend, cuz I have not pluged in any new thins to the computer resently och done anything elsa new with the computer.

I'm not sure what filesystem it is. Is there any way to check that?

Ok, where can I get the Live Linux CD Helix?

If i can't get the files and decide to take the time to redo them insted, is this harddrive busted or can I just format, or do anything else to it, and use it again from the start?

[Harry Kuhman]

Thanks for the answer.

I have no insight on how it might have happend, cuz I have not pluged in any new thins to the computer resently och done anything elsa new with the computer.

I'm not sure what filesystem it is. Is there any way to check that?

Ok, where can I get the Live Linux CD Helix?

If i can't get the files and decide to take the time to redo them insted, is this harddrive busted or can I just format, or do anything else to it, and use it again from the start?

There is a forum on other Live CDs. There is a link that will find helix in the first posting. Or you can likely find it with Google and the words Linux amd Helix.

What version of Windows was it? That will tell us a lot about the file system.

It is very likely that you can recover the hard disk if you just repartition and reformat the drive. You error messages sound like the data structures are bad and not that the drive is no longer working. Of course this is all based on what you are posteing, so I can't be certain. Assuming that you don;t have backups and yet you value the data and want to try to recover it I would not give up hope on that, but I don't want to mislead you that it will be simple, particularly since you don't seem to have much of a background on this.

[Roberth]

Thanks again!

Ok, I found Helix and are downloading it right now. It will be down in 20 min.

I used Windows XP Home

I have backups from a week ago, so I have the raw files, it's just the work that goes undone and that I have to do again. How am I going to repartition an reformat the drive? And then instal an os. I realy like knoppix, is linux something to use insted of win xp for a newbe like me? Does programs and games work in linux?

[Harry Kuhman]

I used Windows XP Home

I have backups from a week ago, so I have the raw files, it's just the work that goes undone and that I have to do again. How am I going to repartition an reformat the drive? And then instal an os. I realy like knoppix, is linux something to use insted of win xp for a newbe like me? Does programs and games work in linux?

The default file system for XP is NTFS, so if you bought the computer with Xp on it or installed XP from scratch you very likely have one big NTFS partition. If you upgraded from 98 to XP and you didn't let XP change the file system at that time then you would have FAT. My guess is that you have NTFS, which unfortunately has a habit of having this type of catastrophic thing happen to it when running XP.

Skipping ahead to your last question, I would highly recommend against any foolish thought of installing Knoppix to hard disk. Knoppix is intended as a Live CD and many bad things can happen when installed to hard disk (which it was never intended for). To be fair to both sides there are different schools of thought on this and some very technical people who can make a Knoppix install work, but it is not for the new user. However, Knoppix is based on Debian and Debian is intended for hard disk install. A modern Debian install is a lot less trouble than a Knoppix install. If, after having used the Live CD, you decide that you want to install Linux, I would suggest that Debian is a good place to start. There are certainly other Linux distros and different distros have different advantages, but if you like Knoppix you should like Debian. Debian can be installed by downloading a single CD by BitTorrent form the debian.org site. After that you can install any of the applications in Knoppix and many many more from Internet with your new Debian system.

To answer the second question, any decent partitioning software will let you delete partitions from the partition table. Some old versions of DOS will not touch non-DOS partitions, but third party software (such as Ranish Partition Manager) will do this, even running under DOS. There are tools on the Knoppix CD that will do it, I don't want to rush into this though until you decide for sure that it's time to give up. And if you do install Debian, as part of the install process it will let you elect to keep existing partitions or wipe them out and start fresh.

[Roberth]

Many thanks again.

I have now got the Helix cd and burned it to a cd and started it on the computer with the bad harddrive. What should I do now, to mount the harddrive?

Yea, linux sounds interesting, but how about the programs and games? Do they all work on linux?

[Harry Kuhman]

I have now got the Helix cd and burned it to a cd and started it on the computer with the bad harddrive. What should I do now, to mount the harddrive?

It's been a while since I used Helix, it may have even had a lot of changes since then. I don't recall the names of the programs but if you explore it a bit you should find a number of programs that try to read files from hard disk partitions. I'm not in a position to dig out my Helix copy and play with it at the moment. Maybe someone else will join in here, otherwise I may be able to look tonight.

......., but how about the programs and games? Do they all work on linux?

If you are asking if Linux will run all of your windows programs, the answer is no. There is software that is intended to help programs written for windows run under Linux, but it certainly doesn't run everything, and games, being some of the most demanding programs, are the least likely to be able to run this way. For some games there are versions that have been compiled to run under Linux, for others there are not. And there is a lot of free open source software that runs under Linux that is intended to replace expensive closed source commercial software for windows. Not the same programs, but basically they do similar things. Sometimes they do this nearly as well as the commercial windows software that costs hundreds of dollars, sometimes they do it much better.