force mount USB drive??

[ingresman]

Hi Guys, hope someone can help, I'm at my wits ebd with this.
Under XP I ran norton defgramenter which norton goback decided was creating too many bad sectors and rebooted the machine for me. Since then I havn't been able to boot the machine. So after some digging i found NTFS4DOS which rus a chkdsk which fails on the drive during the index check which leads me to think the disk is in a bad way. So I need to get the files off and am using Knoppix to do it. I've got a 350gb toshiba external drive (fat32) which knoppix sees fine. However if i try to access the external drive i get the message you cant write to this drive (or similaer) so I dismount the drive (umout /dev/sdb1) and then remount using mount -o rw /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 and it tels me that because windows didn't shut down cleanily I cant mount a drive to write. Is there a way to force the drive to mount?. It is in fact clean (brand new) and I'm at the stage where I'm only trying to salvage the files from windows?. Interestingly my USB memory stick is fine and I can write to that - it thinks its a vfat drive whereas the USB tells me its a fuse device.
Sorry for any confusing stuff, I'm not a Unix system person at all, just know a bit from previous job.
Hope someone can help, or the next step is Kermit (or wireless ??) file transfer

Regards

[Béèm]

What happens if you do:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1

[ingresman]

thanks for that,
tried it and the message is wrong fs type bad superblock and missing code page. Do dmesg | tail
Had a look and it says cant find a valid FAT file system.
Does it make any odds that it's FAT32 ?
Regards
Kevin

[Béèm]

Strange.
I have a removable USB disk (in fact a ZenMicro I configured as a 4GB drive) which is formated in fat32 and the command I gave you is the one I use to mount it.
-t means you will mount the filesystem that follows. vfat is the one for fat16 and fat32

Are you sure your device is in fat32?

[ingresman]

According to the toshiba documentation it is FAT32.
I think the issue is not that it will not mount, it's that knoppix is detecting that windows didn't close cleanly so for whatever reason won't let the USB disc mount - possibly protecting me from myself.
I can mount a ram based USB memory stick, which is vfat, and I can write to it. My assumption is that knoppix knows that it is not a physical disk and for some reason treats it differently.
The floppy also mounts ok.
When I get home I'll try mounting the USB disc on my laptop (fully working !) and see what happens, i'll also see what happends on the dead machine if I mount it for read only (-o r) I belive the default is read/write i.e. -o rw
By the way the dead disk is NTFS


Regards
Kevin

[Béèm]

If your laptop is running XP (or the like) the best thing would be indeed to click 'safely remove hardware' in the system tray and retry on the other machine.