I am trying to recover the data from failed primary bootable FAT32 hard drive with WIN XP. I have downloaded Knoppix and booted from CD. I had no problem to mount the second drive (hdb1) but then I tried to mount primary (had) I got a message “Could not mount device. The reported error was: Failed to load $MTF: Input/output error� .

I created my own mount point /mymount and tried to run “mount –t vfat /dev/hda1 /mymount� and got a message “wrong fstipe, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, missing codepage or other error…�.

I have changed vfat to ntfs ang got an error “Failed to load $MTF…�

I ran “dmesg� it showed that “ FAT: bogus number in reserved sectors. VFS: Can’t find a valid filesystem on /dev/hda1.

I started TestDisk 6.3 utility and got a message : “check_NTFS: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 255 (NTFS) != 16(HD) as well as WORNING “Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don’t match).

I am confused now, should I take the disk off and check the number of heads. I believe it should be printed on disk label?

Thanks for your help