Hi!

I am using Knoppix/linux for the first time but am not new to computers/unix general troubleshooting. And I have spent a considerable amount of time searching the current threads but haven't found anything closely related to my problem. I'm currently a bit stressed about getting my hard drive back... Hope someone can help me!

My problem is that my external USB hard drive crashed (connected by firewire) and I really need that data (300Gb). If it helps: at the time of the crash I was simply moving files around, trying to gather them in 4Gb folders so I could burn some stuff to DVD, cause my drive was just about completely full. At the same time, there was a virus check in the background, reporting a find, which file I deleted (belonging to some software folder I wasn't really using). Think I was also burning one folder at the time of crash as well. In the midst of my file-moving, my explorer window stopped responding, so I rebooted the hard drive and couldn't access it again (says corrupted filesystem). I am using Windows XP Home and the partitions were NTFS, made with Disk Mgmt console. When I tried to access my partitions with Windows Disk Management console, I could see my 3 NTFS partitions, each of the right size, but Windows didn't recognize the filesystem type anymore, describes the partitions as healthy but empty.

Now after some Google research I found that Knoppix has some good chances to recover crashed drives, so I downloaded the latest version I found: 5.0.1. When I boot from the CD it can see the partitions as existing but cannot mount them. When using "mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1" it comes back with:
Code:
Failed to startup volume : Invalid argument
Couldn't mount device '/dev/sdb1' : Invalid argument
Mount failed.
So I used "fdisk -l" to see the partition information and got back:
Code:
Disk /dev/sdb: 300.0 GB  ...
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
The smallest of the 3 partitions has been successfully reformatted in Windows after the crash, there was no data in it (3Gb kept for future linux install...) but even that one I cannot mount with the CD. I can see all 3 icons for all 3 partitions but none can be mounted.

Appreciate any help you can give me!
Thanks!
LaKanook

Yes I know prospects don't look too good but I really want to recover my data, and hopefully without having to pay huge amount of money in the process.