Windows - Partition is there but files have disappeared

[hipgnosis]

Greetings All,

I have just received a hard drive from a parent that has died (with all their critical files on it). The drive is NTFS and has one partition on it.

Brought up Knoppix, mounted hda1 and the Konqueror shows no files.

Going to the command line, cd /mnt/hda1 followed by dir gives an Input/output error.

Viewing the parition table in fdisk shows me the expected bootable NTFS partition.

I am at a loss as to where to go from here. I know there are files on the drive but can't see any of them. Any suggestions as to what course to take next would be greatly appreciated!


Regards,


hipgnosis

[Harry Kuhman]

received a hard drive from a parent that has died (with all their critical files on it). The drive is NTFS and has one partition on it.

Brought up Knoppix, mounted hda1 and the Konqueror shows no files.

When someone refers to a disk that "has died" I generally don't expect it to spin up or have a good partition on it. What actually happened to this disc isn't clear but knowing it may help others give you better feedback.

From what you have said, it sounds like the disk itself is fine, but someone or something erased all of the files on the disk. There are some programs that will try to examine a disk and recover deleted files. Many of these run under Windows but unfortunately while there are many widely available for FAT systems, the ones for NTFS systems seem to be peddled by people who want to charge an arm and a leg from desperate XP users who have suffered this all too common problem. If you do find a legitimately free one that works well, please post back here about it.

As long as your partition table is correct then I know of nothing that Knoppix will do for you. But you may want to look at another Linux Live CD known as Helix. Helix is designed for forensic file recovery and has some tools that might help you recover information from such a disk.

[hipgnosis]

Thanks for the reply. I probably should have put "has died" in quotes myself.

Upon further prodding it seems like the drive was on a downward trend with some windows errors being reported and some spontaneous reboots occurring.

Naturally the information is vague enough that I couldn't hazard a guess as to what actually occurred.

I will take a peek at the Helix distro - hopefully it'll help!


Regards,


hipgnosis

[Carina]

I know a program called DataRecoveryWizard may help you.

[giant_toaster]

I'm tired. I thought you had a hard drive from one of your parents, that had died, and you wanted to get at their files.

Why would you need Knoppix to read your dead fathers email?

Maybe I should go to bed!