No hard drives found

I'm having a bit of trouble recovering data from a corrupted hard drive.

I managed to boot into it (with noapic and nopcmcia), but it's not detecting my hard drives. At all. I've tried various suggestions in and around this forum (which was a pain because the search function doesn't really work), but to no avail.

I currently have two hard drives in my computer. 1 formatted one that is split into 3 partitions (C, D, E) which has Windows Vista on the C partition. The other hard drive is unformatted. (The uh, formatted one is the one I am trying to recover data from.)

The only things I see on my desktop with the word 'disk' in them are sda and sdb. After some digging I verified that these were my DVD and CD drives, respectively.
Upon plugging in my USB drive it was successfully detected as sdc1

hda is apparently the same as sda - that is, my Knoppix CD. hda1-5, as well as hdab1-5 don't exist.
cat /proc/partitions returns:
sda
sdb
sdb1
sdb2
sdb3
sdc
sdc1

I really have no idea how to go about this. I also might be noobing this up quite hard, but I'm hitting a dead end here. Thanks in advance.

(If I've left out any crucial information I apologize in advance.)

EDIT: Hard drive in question is SATA, formatted NTFS

Can you post the output of:

fdisk -l
(thats l as in list)

sfdisk -l
fdisk -l
(thats l as in list)


also

dmesg | grep sdb

dmesg | grep sda

the | is the "pipe" key

Looking at your output sdb has 3 partitions, this is most likely your hard drive, so its a SATA drive on the first IDE cable as slave, is that correct?
C.D,E are meaningless, as windows drive letters can be reassigned. From computer management, disk partitioner in windows or vista this will
give the information as to the hard drive and its real partition.

Post the outputs of these commands please, I'll see if I can help further

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hal8000

... so its a SATA drive on the first IDE cable as slave, is that correct?...

---

I don't believe there is any such thing a a slave SATA drive. Parallel ATA (IDE) had master and slave, but all SATA drives are master (one drive per SATA connector).

I seem to be having a pretty similar problem. My system is a new machine with 2 physical drives in it, each drive with a Vista partition. I don't know if the drives are SATA or whatever, I can try to find out if that might be significant, but I'll need some help to figure that out. I booted from a live 5.1.1 dvd.

cat /proc/partitions
returns:

major minor #blocks name

240 0 1997952 cloop0

the output from
su
fdisk -l
is
<nothing>

output from:
sfdisk -l
is
<nothing>

output from:
dmesg | grep sdb
is
<nothing>

output from:
dmesg | grep sda
is:
<nothing>

The ISO file that I used for the image check summed alright.

It looks as though the hard drive controller is not being detected.
Does knoppix boot if you append failsafe at the boot prompt?

Can you state make/model of your motherboard and also hard drive
type, whether SATA, pATA or whatever you are using.

HAL,
Thanks for the response. I'm pretty sure the drives are SATA. When I looked under the cover the plugs were definately not PATA, not USB. I couldn't pull the cables without more disturbance than I wanted to make, but they looked like the SATA plugs to me.
The motherboard ... well I hope this helps. It's Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Dual Core Processor, with Intel G33 Express chipset. The brand for the box is Shuttle.
I will have to try your failsafe mode suggestion once I figure out how to do it. Probably will be about a day or so till I can get on the machine and try that out.

For those of you who may have about as much trepidation about going under the covers of a machine as I do, here is how I found the drive type. First off, the BIOS was no help for me. So I did the inevitable, and looked inside. Things were packed very tightly, but I could at least eyeball the drive connectors. I compared them to the photos here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ogy_Attachment

and concluded the most likely candidate to be SATA.

Tony

OK, I booted fine into the failsafe mode and realized I wasn't sure what to do next. I tried the same commands as above, and got the same results as before. Specifically:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tomtj

cat /proc/partitions
returns:

major minor #blocks name

240 0 1997952 cloop0

the output from
su
fdisk -l
is
<nothing>

output from:
sfdisk -l
is
<nothing>

output from:
dmesg | grep sdb
is
<nothing>

output from:
dmesg | grep sda
is:
<nothing>

---

Tony

Just noted the requested command at the top of this forum thread. The lspci -v command was displayed after a failsafe startup. Here is some more output:

knoppix@Knoppix:~$ lspci -v
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 29c0 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 29c2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
Memory at fde80000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
I/O ports at ff00 [size=8]
Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at fdb00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 29c3 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Memory at fdf00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2937 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
I/O ports at fe00 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2938 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 20
I/O ports at fd00 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2939 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
I/O ports at fc00 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 293c (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
Memory at fdfff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Unknown device 293e (rev 02)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 3
Memory at fdff8000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2940 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0
I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff
Memory behind bridge: fd900000-fd9fffff
Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000fd800000-00000000fd8fffff
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2942 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=0
I/O behind bridge: 0000b000-0000bfff
Memory behind bridge: fdd00000-fddfffff
Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000fdc00000-00000000fdcfffff
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2934 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
I/O ports at fb00 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2935 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
I/O ports at fa00 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2936 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
I/O ports at f900 [size=32]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 293a (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
Memory at fdffe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
Bus: primary=00, secondary=03, subordinate=03, sec-latency=32
I/O behind bridge: 0000c000-0000cfff
Memory behind bridge: fda00000-fdafffff
Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000f8000000-00000000fbffffff
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2912 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2920 (rev 02) (prog-if 8f [Master SecP SecO PriP PriO])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
I/O ports at f800 [size=8]
I/O ports at f700 [size=4]
I/O ports at f600 [size=8]
I/O ports at f500 [size=4]
I/O ports at f400 [size=16]
I/O ports at f300 [size=16]
Capabilities: <access denied>

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2930 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 11
Memory at fdffd000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
I/O ports at 0500 [size=32]

00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2926 (rev 02) (prog-if 85 [Master SecO PriO])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3106
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
I/O ports at f100 [size=8]
I/O ports at f000 [size=4]
I/O ports at ef00 [size=8]
I/O ports at ee00 [size=4]
I/O ports at ed00 [size=16]
I/O ports at ec00 [size=16]
Capabilities: <access denied>

01:00.0 IDE interface: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2368 (prog-if 85 [Master SecO PriO])
Subsystem: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2368
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
I/O ports at df00 [size=8]
I/O ports at de00 [size=4]
I/O ports at dd00 [size=8]
I/O ports at dc00 [size=4]
I/O ports at db00 [size=16]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at fd800000 [disabled] [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4364 (rev 12)
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 3016
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
Memory at fddfc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
I/O ports at be00 [size=256]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at fdc00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

03:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hauppauge computer works Inc. WinTV PVR 150
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 128, IRQ 5
Memory at f8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
Capabilities: <access denied>

03:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
Subsystem: Holco Enterprise Co, Ltd/Shuttle Computer Unknown device 5106
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18
Memory at fdaff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
Memory at fdaf8000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

knoppix@Knoppix:~$

Just to come "full circle" on this information. I just booted the 5.3.1 distribution last night on this machine, and it was now able to find my drives. I was delighted. Many Thanks to the Knoppix development team!