Not sensing data present on the hard drive?

[jmo88]

Greetings!

I have a desktop that I've been using Knoppix 6.2 on for a wee bit, and I've been loving it so far. I also have a ThinkPad laptop with Windows Vista installed as the primary operating system, and I hate Vista with a passion, so I got the bright idea to try Knoppix on it as well.

Everything seems to load fine with the CD, and I get to the Knoppix desktop screen, but I can't access any of my data from the primary operating system. If I plug in my external hard drive, it will sense that, but it's like it can't see my internal hard drive. I booted back into Windows to check; the data is still there, and nothing seems to be amiss. I just can't access it using Knoppix.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening? I'm pretty new to this OS and enjoying it a lot thus far (I've also been reading a lot of posts here - so much useful information and it seems like a friendly community) - hopefully someone can help me.

Thank you in advance,
J

[krishna.murphy]

It sounds like what I experience when I forget and use the "hibernate" feature in Windows XP - the NTFS partition is not accessible. My sense of what works well (not at all what everyone likes!) is to use the Vista partitioning tool to make some space on the hard drive, then shut Vista down and boot Knoppix. Gparted (or whatever you want to use) can then create a physical partition in the free space you created, plus a couple of logical partitions and you can initialize.

First, make a Linux-swap partition, about 1.5-2x the size of your RAM, then make a FAT32 partition in the remaining space, which you can then use to store Knoppix itself, plus the persistent store and a goodly amount of unused FAT32 space for storing files that are then usable by Vista. Now you can go about the business of setting up booting; see the treatise "Fool-proof-multi-boot-PC-with-Knoppix-6.2.1" by Capricorny here. Or, you can just use a flash drive and the flash-install script and see if the performance is what you need it to be.

Cheers!
Krishna

[ckamin]

Krisna,

So what you are suggesting is booting Knoppix from the Hard drive and making changes to accomodate that. Just how does that resolve the issue of "Not seeing (Sensing) the data on the Hard Drive"? I'd be looking at drive mounting and hardware/driver issues, rather than having someone make changes to the drive that they still couldn't read.

[krishna.murphy]

Krisna,

So what you are suggesting is booting Knoppix from the Hard drive and making changes to accomodate that. Just how does that resolve the issue of "Not seeing (Sensing) the data on the Hard Drive"? I'd be looking at drive mounting and hardware/driver issues, rather than having someone make changes to the drive that they still couldn't read.

Have you ever used Knoppix from a hard drive? It's definitely faster than using it from an optical drive, or even a flash on USB2. Almost all of my own Knoppix usage these days is done 'loaded from internal hard drive.' What I thought he needed most was the bit about not being able to access NTFS partitions that are "hibernated" from Windows. The rest was just a suggestion about how he could accomplish what I perceived to be his purpose, and gain some speed in the bargain; I even pointed out that there are different approaches favored by others. In the end, he'll make his own choice about what will be in his best interest - hopefully with input from many, as well as myself. I'm all for a healthy discussion about pros/cons/trade-offs!

Cheer!
Krishna

[utu]

@jmo88

Are you really sure you can't find your hard drive?
If you click system tools/pcman don't you have an entry for OS?

I can see my win7, but I don't mess with it.

[Capricorny]

I tend to be very careful using pcman, and rather do the basic administrative steps from the command line. This has been mentioned a number of times before, but here it goes:

First, open a terminal window and check what the Knoppix system thinks is the storage setup:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x76692ca8

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1912    15357116   1c  Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2   *        1913       17112   122094000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           17113       60801   350931892+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           17113       60801   350931861    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16001036288 bytes
32 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15501 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 = 1032192 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0ce14c25

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       15501    15624976+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$

Hopefully, you will see some Windows HPFS/NTFS partitions, like I did here. If you don't, you should go back to Windows disk administration and register carefully Windows' view of the system. And close fully down afterwards (cfr krishna.m's remarks). Here, /dev/sdb1 is the 16GB FAT-formatted USB stick I am running Knoppix from.

IF you see what you are looking for, then you could try a manual mount of the system. At this point, you could become superuser (root in Unixspeak), but it is safer to take on those privileges on a per command basis, by prefixing all commands with sudo.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ sudo mount -o ro -t ntfs /dev/sda5 /media/sda5
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             15609712   8291128   7318584  54% /mnt-system
tmpfs                  1048576         0   1048576   0% /ramdisk
/dev/cloop             8827264   8827264         0 100% /KNOPPIX
/dev/loop0             3691008   1733424   1770084  50% /KNOPPIX-DATA
unionfs                3691008   1733424   1770084  50% /UNIONFS
unionfs                3691008   1733424   1770084  50% /home
tmpfs                    10240        68     10172   1% /UNIONFS/var/run
tmpfs                    10240         0     10240   0% /UNIONFS/var/lock
tmpfs                   102400       104    102296   1% /UNIONFS/var/log
tmpfs                  1048576        12   1048564   1% /tmp
udev                     20480       440     20040   3% /dev
tmpfs                  1048576         4   1048572   1% /dev/shm
/dev/loop/1            3444972   1008304   2261668  31% /store/share
/dev/sda5            350931860     41768 350890092   1% /media/sda5

Here, I use the Unix mount, with the switches -o ro -t ntfs to mount a NTFS partition readonly. The mount point has to exist, /media/sda5 is automatically created by the system for you. The df command tells you how much space is left on each device (implicitly, what devices are in fact mounted), you can see the NTFS volume /dev/sda5 turned up with 350GB free.

Now, you can take backups and collect all sorts of statistics from that NTFS volume safely, because you have mounted it readonly. You can unmount it manually too, sudo umount /media/sda5 in my case, but it will be unmounted on system shutdown in any case, so it is not mandatory.