My harddrive will not show on my desktop or anywhere.

I have a Dell dimensions computer that i bought 3 months ago. The hard drive ended up being bad. The repair man was here and set in a new harddrive. Everything works fine. I was using windows XP Media edition... The Problem is.... I NEED the information on that bad harddrive desperately! I was recommended to try this Knoppix to hopefully be able to get in to that hardrive.

On My desktop i don\t have any icons of a harddrive. Please help me get into this harddrive as i only have a day with it before the dell man comes back here to take it. Even though it\s broke, they won\t let me keep it too long.
Pleaseeee my time is running out and i am very new to this knoppix and have been reading other topics here to see if i can find the answers i need, but i have no luck.

Thank you for any help.

Breezy

Answer #7

Sorry Harry. Thank you for reminding me :)

Knoppix can't solve all bad hard drive problems. The drive might be so dead that it isn't spinning for example, or the heads might not be moving. On the other hand you might have the very common problem of Windows destroying it's partition. In some of these cases Knoppix can still see files, in others it can't. If the drive is running well enough that Knoppix can see the disk then the gpart command might help recover the partition table. An alternative might be to use a forensic recovery CD like Helix and see if it can read any of the files off the disk (the safest thing to do would be to try Helix first, before letting gpart change anything).

You have come across one of the very bad things about the Dell and similar service warranties. Yes, they will replace the disk, but they take your old one, and you're never really sure where that information ends up. If you have banking , email or any other important information out there (and it's likely that you do, even if it's only an e-mail confirmation of a purchase with you credit card number of an account number with the seller who retains the credit card number), you should really be concerned about what happens to the drive. If you can get it working well enough to write to it I would suggest at the very least running some application designed to completely wipe data from the drive before turning it over (reformatting is not enough), if not hope whoever gets his hands on the bad drive doesn't manage to recover it. There are way too many stories of disks turned in to depots that were supposedly going to be destroyed that resurfaced and contained private information.

My Harddrives are spinnng. I can hear them and feel them. I went into System, Kinfo center, then clicked on SCSI and then i can see my harddrives there. I have no idea how to get into them, i need step by step directions because i am new to this knoppix. However, on the desktop.. it still does not show my harddrives.
I went to the Helix as you said and downloaded it and burned it to a cd. Its running and working well (i guess) but i do not know how to get into it. I need step by step directions for this as well. I would like to try this before doing the gpart as you said. But if this Helix don't work.... can you guide me through the gpart. I will continue checking this message board quite a bit today as Dell wants to have the harddrive back. Like you said too, I do not want my information in someone else's hands. I do have my CC and bank info along with other personal pw's and numbers. The last thing i want is for someone else to get these.

One other thing, i read about trying cheatcodes with knoppix. Do you have any information on this? Where do you type these codes, and what the codes are? I need step by step directions for that too!

Thanks so much Harry for your help. I really appreciate it.

Breezy

There are a lot of forensic tools in Helix and I've only used it minimally myself and over a year ago, so I've forgotten a lot and it has likely changed since then. So I couldn't hlp much there more than read the documentation myself, I suggest it would be more efficent to cut out the middle man there.

As to gpart, read the man page for it. man gpart at a console. Youi can let it run and see if it wants to change your patrition table without actually letting it make the change. Run it, look over the resuts and see if the seem reasonable to you based on what you think was on the disk, and decide if you want to let it write to the disk based on that.