Help me through a HD recovery via Yahoo and I will pay you.

[mistyb]

My hard drive is not working. I took it in to our local repair shop for a recovery and they said the data was not retriveable using the program they use and that it needed to be sent to a "clean room". An online friend offered to help me work through Knoppix but I think our opposite schedules may prevent it for a few days and I am going nuts over this.

I am mostly clueless when it comes to tech issues but very good at following directions.

If you can help me through Knoppix and help me recover any part of my hard drive, I will pay you via paypal for ALL of your time. If I send it off for recovery, I am out hundreds of dollars so I figure I have nothing to lose.

I downloaded the knoppix onto my laptop. Burnt a CD. Installed it into my desktop. Pressed F3, typed Knoppix, Got to the Knoppix Desktop and when I click on Hard Disk Partition [hda1] I get the error:

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

Where do i go from there or whatelse can I try?

Please PM me if you are willing to help.

Thank you!

Misty

[Harry Kuhman]

I downloaded the knoppix onto my laptop. Burnt a CD. Installed it into my desktop. Pressed F3, typed Knoppix, Got to the Knoppix Desktop and when I click on Hard Disk Partition [hda1] I get the error:

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

Where do i go from there or whatelse can I try?

I don't want your money, and I certainly don't want anything to do with Paypal. I'll still try to help.

I have no idea what you mean by the above, starting with Installed it to my desktop. You don't "install it to your desktop" after burning the CD, you boot it. At the prompt you can indeed type F3 and Knoppix if you want, but it would be no different than if you just hit enter or waited 30 seconds. If that's where you are then indeed you seem to be having a problem opening hda1. You should be able to click on the hda1 icon to open the partition, but it may indeed be corrupt. It does sound like the disk is at least spinning though if you see hda1, that's a good sign.

I have two suggestions to offer.

You could download and burn the Live CD Helix. Helix is intended as a forensic recovery CD, so there may be tools on it that let you recover your data. With Helix there is no need to write to the disk, so it should be safer, but it may take more work.

The other option is to boot Knoppix and use the command gpart to try to fix the partition table. See man gpart for details. Gpart examiner the disk and trys to repair a corrupt partition table, which might be your problem. That is, your problem might be some corruption in the disk partition itself, which gpart can't fix, or it might just be corruption in the partition table (part of the MBR) and gpart can fix that. This is a much faster fix but there is some small risk in doing this in that gpart will write to the disk, and if it doesn't make things better there is a small chance it could make things worse. I believe there is also a testdisk command that may do the same partition table repair that gpart does, but I have not used that.

Good luck.

[mistyb]

I am a flake...and already confusing someone. ; )

I meant to say inserted the CD into my computer with the non working hard drive.

It does show hda1 on the knoppix desktop but it produces the error message above when I click on the hard disk icon. I have tried it several times. same error message each time.

If i type gpart at the beginning prompt, is there anything else that I need to do or it will it be fairly intuitive to use?

[Harry Kuhman]

Gpart is not typed at the boot prompt. Boot into Knoppix (it seems now that you were doing that rather than the desktop install thing). Once Knoppix is running, click the K next to the penguin near the bottom, select knoppix from the menu choices and select root shell from the options that pop up. Don't run gpart yet. Type man gpart to read the documentation (map page, short for manual page). Also, type man testdisk to read the man page for testdisk. Use q to leave man and get back to the prompt. I suspect either may fix your problem if it's the partition table and not the partition itself (and it usually is the partition table, but not always). Eventually use gpart or testdisk with the correct options and if the program can fix your disk it will.

[mistyb]

I read through the manual/man gpart and I think it is way above my level of proficiency. I am afraid to do anything that will harm the hard drive. I would rather pay $500 to get it fixed than destroy it myself for free. ; )

[rusty]

If you open a root shell and type: fdisk -l, and post the output here, (This will not do anything to the drive, just attempt to list the partitions).

You could also try running gpart -v, which will not do anything but attempt to find the partitions on the drive, and post the output here. gpart usually takes a long time to finish - a couple hours is not unusual.

If the drive has been making alot of loud clicking noises as you do things, it is probably mechanically broken, and you will have to send it out.

Finally, if you can log onto IRC, there is a #knoppix channel on freenode where you might be able to get real time help.

[Harry Kuhman]

I read through the manual/man gpart and I think it is way above my level of proficiency. I am afraid to do anything that will harm the hard drive. I would rather pay $500 to get it fixed than destroy it myself for free. ; )

That's your call. I hope however that if you do pay someone it is for real value, more than we have given you here for free. Not for someone less concerned about your data than you who just tells you what switches the gpart command requires to write the MBR back to the disk. By the way, if the gpart options look too complex, the man page for testdisk indicates it could be run with no switches, just type testdisk. I'll say that here so someone else doesn't say it privately and then expect you to pay $500 for it.

Do pay attention to rusty's advice but note that he said loud noises. The normal motor hum and ticking as the heads step is nothing to be paranoid about.