HD file recovery - bad MBR?

[Ixtab]

Hello,
I have recently had a Western Digital 500GB DD fail on me. It is only about a year old and it was fairly full. I have been trying to find a way to recover some of the data from it, and have booted to Knoppix 6.2 on a cd.

From here, I cannot see the drive in the File Manager, and in the Palimsest Disk Utility, I see my good HDDs/Partitins fine, but the broken one shows up as 2199 GB (I wish it was that big, but it's only actually 500), and it says "SMART not available" and where the partition info would be it sows as Unrecognized and not Partitioned. I have the option to create a partition table, but it says that data will be lost, so I have not done that.

I am very new to my Linux dabbling, and I really don't know where to go from here. I have been searching tese forums, and googling, but have not come up with anything that has helped so far.

Any pointers would be very very much appreciated, and if you need mroe info, just let em know what you need.

Oh, also, one other thing - in the Palimpsest Disk Utility, it also shows a whole bunch of other Hard Disks, and Solid-State Disks with unrecognized partitions... I do not know how pertinant that is, but I have no idea what they are supposed to be.

Thanks for reading this, and advance thanks for any help anyone can offer.

[krishna.murphy]

Do a search for "Hiren's boot CD" and you'll find a number of links; the best download server (or was it a torrent?) was in Thailand. There are a LOT of programs on there, some of which require licenses, at least from a legal standpoint. I had a problem with my NTFS partition that crashed Windows very quickly, and was eventually fixed by an old Microsoft scandisk (which doesn't need a license), but NOT the one on my Winders XP - not sure why they would have "fixed" the program by making it less functional, but that's Microsoft for you.

Krishna

Hello,
I have recently had a Western Digital 500GB DD fail on me. It is only about a year old and it was fairly full. I have been trying to find a way to recover some of the data from it, and have booted to Knoppix 6.2 on a cd.

From here, I cannot see the drive in the File Manager, and in the Palimsest Disk Utility, I see my good HDDs/Partitins fine, but the broken one shows up as 2199 GB (I wish it was that big, but it's only actually 500), and it says "SMART not available" and where the partition info would be it sows as Unrecognized and not Partitioned. I have the option to create a partition table, but it says that data will be lost, so I have not done that.

I am very new to my Linux dabbling, and I really don't know where to go from here. I have been searching tese forums, and googling, but have not come up with anything that has helped so far.

Any pointers would be very very much appreciated, and if you need mroe info, just let em know what you need.

Oh, also, one other thing - in the Palimpsest Disk Utility, it also shows a whole bunch of other Hard Disks, and Solid-State Disks with unrecognized partitions... I do not know how pertinant that is, but I have no idea what they are supposed to be.

Thanks for reading this, and advance thanks for any help anyone can offer.