Urgent Problem: Hard Drive severely corrupted by Knoppix...

This is very bad...I run Windows 98 SE on my laptop, but a friend was telling me about Knoppix and I decided to try out some things. Well, it booted wonderfully and it was all quite nice until I tried to restart...something must have gone wrong when Knoppix was shutting down, because my computer now thinks it has no hard drive. I'm guessing that Knoppix was messing with partitions and didn't quite finish tying up loose ends...so basically my computing experience right now consists of a BIOS splash screen and a lovely "Operating System Not Found" message. Please, if anyone knows how to get back good old C:\, I really need it. Btw, I have tried booting back into Knoppix, which works of course--but there's no hda1; the only drives that show up are the ramdrive, the floppy, and the DVD. Help, please!

There's something you aren't telling us. By default Knoppix would do nothing to damage or even touch your partition. Even if you looked at your files it would be read-only.

What commands did you run? Did you play with qtparted perhaps?

I agree with greenfly, Knoppix is a "closed" operating system, by default, and is "locked down". Knoppix may "see" physical hard drives, and the partitions on them, but, does not, "by default", open them, or touch them. NOT unless a person tells Knoppix to "open" a partition or hard drive, and then, as greenfly said, Knoppix will, by default, only open a partition or drive as "read only" - to write on a drive requires a person to tell Knoppix that it should allow for "write" access, and this is even more "harder" if the partition is a NTFS formatted partition. Considering you are running Win98se, NTFS is probably not the issue here, just giving more information.

Now, for possible resolves...

( 1 ) You are not telling all of the information - Did "you" open any hard drives, or partitions, while you were booted with Knoppix? Did "you" change permissions from accessing the drives, or partitions, from read-only to write enabled? Did "you" run any drive, or partition, programs, while in Knoppix, that changed, or modified, any, drive or partition, and lastly, did you commit, save, or write, those changes to the physical devices? Did "you" open your "C:/" for read / write access, and possibly alter, or modify, any known Windows system or boot files, while in Knoppix?

( 2 ) Another situation. Quite plausable, and "can" happen... Random hard drive crash. If you'd have been booted into Win98SE at the time, you would have crashed just the same, and having been in another OS at the time, the drive "crashed", as the saying goes, behind your back. If this is the case, Knoppix had nothing to do with it, nor, any other OS that you would have booted off of that didnt use the hard drive. The drive just crashed, they do that sometimes. Hard drives are not "permanent", they fail, someday, and sometime. This is why hardware is sold with a MTBF rating; hard drives, floppy drives, flash, sticks, cdrom's, DVD's,. etc... If you did nothing but boot Knoppix, and never touched any drives, I would have to say, this is the cause, only explaination.

As a consolation, I have run Knoppix, from the CD boot, with a installation of Win98SE, on two seperate systems, and not once, had problems with my Win98 boot - I simply changed my BIOS to boot from CD, or hard drive, in the boot order. I did this for months, and not once, did my Win98 have any problems - I even saved a few documents on the C:/ - but I never "tweaked" any existing Win98 files, altered any "known" Win98 boot files, or system files, and I never ran any partition or disk altering program within Knoppix that "played" with my "physical" hard drives... and if I did, like cfdisk, I never saved, or commited, any changes to those physical devices.

Dont get me wrong here, virtualoverride, I am not trying to "point the finger" away from Knoppix, since it appears you want to blame all of this on Knoppix, but, with all I know about Knoppix, and what others, who have run Knoppix, know, you are, in essence, using, as the perverbial phrase goes, blaming this on a person who is using a unloaded gun. Knoppix is this "unloaded gun", so to speak. If it "did" break your Win98 install, someone had to have put the bullets in the gun, because, by default, Knoppix is completely empty of any bullets to fire with. Oh, sure, it can be loaded, and yes, it "could" be fired, but, this all requires the person to have given that to Knoppix, told it to do something. This is true with "any" operating system, except that, in this case, the operating system was completely off of your hard drive, and was locked down, by default, from touching, or messing with, your hard drives. Not saying that, if you just openned the C:/ to look at it, to peer into any files, w/o saving, or commiting any changes, would have caused this, it shouldnt have... I looked at a lot of files on my Win98 installs, from within Knoppix's CD boot, but never modified anything that would be for my Windows install...

This is what puzzles me, though...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VirtualOverride (basically)

... a friend was telling me about Knoppix and I decided to try out some things. Well, it booted wonderfully and it was all quite nice until I tried to restart...something must have gone wrong when Knoppix was shutting down ...

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What "exactly" is "trying out some things"?

as for the "something must have gone wrong when Knoppix was shutting down", the only time this would be an issue is, that, ONE, you had your C:/ openned for READ/WRITE access, TWO, you had changed, or modified, one or more files on that drive, THREE, you had not unmounted the drive and decided to reboot, or, FOUR, decided just to reboot, and, lastly, FIVE, you didnt let Knoppix finish up making those changes on the drives and properly allow it to close, or unmount the drive before you started your Windows booting... i.e. you hit the power or reset button to get to a reboot before Knoppix could "properly" save your changes to that drive. AGAIN, all of this, "hinges" on the fact that you would have had to have the drive openned, wrote to it, and then, not given Knoppix the chance to save those changes correctly...

This "would" explain your comment: "I'm guessing that Knoppix was messing with partitions and didn't quite finish tying up loose ends..", because, the only way this kind of explaination could be suggested, is in the above situation... Because Knoppix's only "shutdown process", when booting off the CD only, is to close down the RAM Drive ( unless you were using a "persistant home", or "save configuration", but, you didnt say anything about that... and even these two things, when Knoppix is "let" to shutdown properly, is not a cause for this kind of failure - I did it on my old systems - many times - no problems ).

So, I will stick with my two suggestions above, what may have happened. If you do not want to supply any more information about this, then I "firmly" believe in the two suggestions I have given here... If more information is provided, then, maybe, these suggestions may be increased, or altered, but, with the information you have given, and the issue, Knoppix is not at fault. Knoppix is only the "messenger", who delieved the message as promissed, at the wrong time, or, was simply a tool, unloaded, that was given the bullets that were used to fire with, and which, then, killed the drive...

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

Alright, thank you very much for the quick replies...now we find out if I'm irrecoverably stupid or just a little foolish...lol. I thought about it afterwards and I do know that Knoppix stays in memory and doesn't modify partitions by default...I should have given more info--sorry! Truth is, though, I didn't think about it until you mentioned changing file permissions...ugh soo I was trying to get my WiFi card working so I could access my network from within Knoppix...from Windows I had downloaded the drivers and saved the tar.gz file on my hd, so I booted to Knoppix and extracted it. The installer had to be built, so I executed "make install" as the readme said, but I got an error saying that the directory was read-only. And here's where I probably did something stupid...I did chmod 755 on the dir. The install still wasn't working and I got tired of it and shut down Knoppix. And that's where the problem started...so yea...tell me what I did; I'm working with a very basic Linux knowledge (actually I've rarely used Linux unless you count Unix-based FTP servers), which is probably my first problem. Don't think I'm blaming Knoppix, btw--lol as you said, if anyone killed my hard drive it was with a gun that I loaded...I'm just hoping I didn't quite finish it off. Let me know if you can help me in light of all this...thanks!

virtualoverride,

Hmmm,

What directory did you download the tar.gz file into, what directory did you try and install it from, and, lastly, what was the directory that you did a chmod to?

My, educated guess here, mind you, is that the directory was NOT a windows maintained directory; like c:/windows, c:/program files, and c:/windows/system, etc... ( AND ) that since you were running Knoppix on your hard drive, from the CD boot, the hard drive was read-only -=- as you said, it was erroring out saying it couldnt write to the drive... I am taking a guess here, from the input given, that you never touched your hard drive, never made any "changes" to the hard drive, that the install couldnt save, and even the chmod didnt work, unless you changed the hard drive to be read-write access ( within Knoppix and booting off the CD, that is ).

So, with all this information, my "best" guess, is, that either the hard drive just "went out" ( see the random thing ), or, the MBR / boot area of the hard drive crashed -=- What I would do...

Boot off a Windows CD install Disk, either the CDROM or Floppy, go directly to a DOS prompt, and see what fdisk reports. FDisk should be able to find the hard drive, and display if "any" partition are existing, or if the drive is completely lost everything. You can also check in your BIOS - if it has the ability to display any drives attached to your system ( formatted / fdisked / or not ). This could just come down to the drive lost its MBR, or the boot sector...

I, honestly, would not use Knoppix, for the above... Windows should be used to find its own file structure, and to resolve that file structure, not Linux. ( I am thinking of your data, and Knoppix "can" work with Windows, but, Windows is the best solution for solving "windows" issues ). Again, I want to make my reasons clear here, I am concerned for your data, for the possibility of that data being corupted any more with something other than "windows", and, lastly, having something other than "windows", playing with that data, could, and possibly, would, corrupt that data to the point that it may not be recoverable ( not sure if that is where you are at this point, but, if anything is going to "fix" it, it should be Windows ).

Lastly, I would suggest posting a thread in the "Windows Forum" here, mention all the things you did, and what you are running, and what you are currently getting, now. Be as honest as you can, no one is trying to accuse, or "point fingers" here, just want to resolve the issue, and with more information, someone may be able to give better resolutions. If you only give "slight" information, someone might just suggest you try re-formatting and re-installing ( not the best resolve, and WILL cause data loss ), but, if more information is given, it may be found that a simple command exists to "rebuild" what really got hosed, and regain all information, without ANY data loss ( the best resolve, if possible ).

I've never seen this before, honest here, but, it sounds like the drive went out - and just happened at a time, where, it wasnt in use. If this had happened in "windows", you would have probably known it, or something would have started "flagging" as going bad - like; I cant locate data file "this", and then start saying, I cant find "this" program", etc... Until the spiral of doom was apparent... As it was, you were in another OS, which was not relying on those files for its running, and thus, didnt report this failure, until the reboot.

Thats about the best I can help with, on this, not much of a "windows" tech, anymore...

Good luck on your resolve,
Ms. Cuddles

Wild guessing on the recovery process here since I haven't a clue as to what actually wnt wrong but:
Try booting Knoppix again & see if it can read the HD. If it can, it probably wasn't a total HD crash. If you can read the HD, run 'sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda' verify that the partition table is OK and that the filesystem type is 'b'. Reason for checking the filesystem type is that some programs (QTparted) have been known to change the filesystem type to '1b' (fat32 hidden) without the user intending it & that will make your windows O/S disappear without a trace. I know yopu weren't using QTparted but ....
If you get this far, it means the windows files are still there just not accessable for some reason. Post back & we'll try to help again.

Alright; thanks again for the replies. Just to clarify the extent of the problem...I already tried most of the things you suggested. First thing I tried was within the BIOS...and the auto-detect said there was no drive. And then I tried booting into Knoppix again, and it also said there was no drive. And then I tried the Win98 boot and fdisk said there was no drive. So I checked inside just to make sure ;) lol...apparently I'm the only one who believes there actually IS a drive in the comp.
And no, I definitely didn't play with qtparted; "trying out some things" doesn't include messing with partitions! hehe I do know enough to avoid that. It's not my OS or a partition that has disappeared here--it's literally an entire drive.
Oh, and yea the directory I chmoded was just a subfolder on drive C:--nothing special. And it gave an error so I'm sure you're right--it wasn't a chmod that killed the drive.
And now that I think about it...it may have actually gotten halfway into Windows after exiting Knoppix. I know, it sounds retarded--I didn't think about it before, but...I don't remember exactly (too bad I didn't write this down as it was happening), but I believe I restarted and got to the Windows loading screen and then it crashed...arg. Sounds like Knoppix had nothin to do with it; but thanks a lot for at least getting me thinking in the right direction. It was just a weird time to happen, you know? The only thing I had done different was running Knoppix, and I kinda panicked and it was the logical connection...anyways, I'll see if any Windows forum ppl have any suggestions, but at this point I may need a data recovery center. I mean, the BIOS can't even detect that there is a drive present. That's pretty serious, huh? I'm way beyond reformatting and reinstalling at this point...ah well, it shouldn't surprise me too much. This thing's lasted me for 5 or 6 years of heavy use...not too bad. Guess it's time for a new comp...I just hope I can recover the 6 years worth of work saved on that drive... If you know anything about data recovery centers (or any recovery method that I might be able to do myself) then I'd appreciate it, but other than that, you've done more than enough! Thanks!

(Edit) I just got off the phone with a few recovery places around town...sounds like no one can do hardware recovery; I'll probably have to ship it off somewhere and pay a fortune...dang... One guy suggested the "freezer trick" though--stickin the drive in the freezer overnight. Ever heard of it? I'm headin out right now and someone will probably drop it if I put it in the freezer now, but I'll try that tonight after I get home from work...maybe it'll work by some chance. Just lettin you know; but thanks again!

you didnt swap the ide cables around by anychance did you?

show use the output of

Code:

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fdisk -l

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if it turns up /hda then that means the hardware its self is actuly there but the partitions might not.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by virtualoverride

(Edit) I just got off the phone with a few recovery places around town...sounds like no one can do hardware recovery; I'll probably have to ship it off somewhere and pay a fortune...dang... One guy suggested the "freezer trick" though--stickin the drive in the freezer overnight. Ever heard of it? I'm headin out right now and someone will probably drop it if I put it in the freezer now, but I'll try that tonight after I get home from work...maybe it'll work by some chance. Just lettin you know; but thanks again!

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yes the freezer is a known work-around. See this article and its comments for more HD tips: http://hardware.newsforge.com/articl.../1924226&tid=9

Thanks for the links. Oh and I guess I forgot to mention it's a laptop...so the IDE cables aren't the problem; lol.
I checked out some of the tips...but since the freezer trick only buys 20 min or so of time, I ordered an adapter to hook the laptop drive to my desktop so I can transfer everything over. It'll be here in 2 business days, so I guess I just wait til then...

what is the output of

Code:

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sudo fdisk -l

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by virtualoverride

(Edit) I just got off the phone with a few recovery places around town...sounds like no one can do hardware recovery; I'll probably have to ship it off somewhere and pay a fortune...dang... One guy suggested the "freezer trick" though--stickin the drive in the freezer overnight. Ever heard of it? I'm headin out right now and someone will probably drop it if I put it in the freezer now, but I'll try that tonight after I get home from work...maybe it'll work by some chance. Just lettin you know; but thanks again!

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I shouldn't even be telling this, might give somebody bad ideas.
I once bought a brand new 2 G HD from a store which had a "return within one week 'else deal with the mfgr" repair policy. So I installed it, worked OK, then I left on vacation. One my return more than a week later, no workee! Eventually I discovered it had a bad connection of some sort inside & needed to be 'jiggled' during the boot up to get it to go. So I ended up with a computer that literally needed a kick start. I'm not actually suggesting thta you give your laptop a firm smack on the side but....