Cant open NTFS partition

Ive been struggling for three days now to Retrieve some data off of my 200gb SATA drive, winxp crashed and something goofy is going on. Ive tried a few different things and now as a last resort trying to learn how to use knoppix, but not sure if its going to help, someone point me in the right direction please


If been able to access the drive a few different ways with other computers sata/usb adapters but.....
Two partitions show up one with fat32 and 4.5gb, the second is showing FAT and 10.1mb with any of the ways if tried to access the drive/partition, NOW the problem is
I know the 2nd partition is approx 180gb and NTFS.

Now even in knoppix its showing its only a 10.mb drive. I can open/mount the drive and its showing 114.2 gb and 67 files, but the file names are fubared and nothing will open. NOt sure if im a dumbass and I cant just simply open them or what. but something isnt right and have no idea what to do.

Last night, i attempted to run testdisk from the ultimate boot cd and it made its about 50% through and for some reason the power to my computer was lost and I havent been able to get testdisk to run agian from that boot cd. IS there a version of testdisk on Knoppix, I cant find it at all or just dont know how to acess it. Im using the cd version of knoppix v5.1.

Any help is greatly appreciated, im completly new to linux and knoppix itself
Thanks

There is a good chance the partition has been overwritten with this 10 MB partition which replaced it in the partition table i.e. the partition was deleted and a new 10MB partition was created.

The 10 MB partition has probably clobbered any data under it's fat tables. The rest of the data may be salvagable. If nothing else (better ideas) comes up, I would consider deleting the 10 MB partition and then running a NTFS recovery program against the unpartitioned part of the drive. You will have to either put the drive in another machine or make or forensic type bit copy of the entire drive over a network onto a drive or partition on another machine. It will cost $80-100 for a file recovery program.

Is there that much to salvage on the drive?

I lost a lot of digital photos on an NT partition and had to do this for my wife.

I have written about this other times on this forum.

Good hunting.

Dick

Testdisk is installed with Knoppix. Go to a command line (root console) and enter...
SUDO TESTDISK.