Trouble Recovering Files

[Tellytubby]

Hi all,

I recently had a hard drive problem on my newest computer (about a year old now) and there are some files on there I would really like to be able to recover. I read up about Knoppix program just yesterday and managed to make the computer boot off a Knoppix cd. Entering the knoppix desktop I clicked on "Hard Disk [sda]", only to receive a message saying:

Could not mount device

The reported error was:

mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified.

I am at a loss. I have been using this http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/ guide. All I wish to do is get some files off that hard drive and on to a usb. Can anyone assist me with this problem? Are my files forever lost? I have spent a long long time to get this far and if anyone can help me it would be much appreciated. If there is any info needed which I haven't given just ask.

Thanks, Andrew

[stlchuck]

Are you sure you tried to mount the correct drive? Internal drives on your computer would have carried a designation of "hda1", "hda2" for a primary drive, or for a secondary drive "hdb1" etc. An external USB drive would have been "sda1", "sda2", or "sdb1", etc. Once you have mounted the correct drives you should see a list of your files on the computers hard drive on one window and your USB on the other - it should be a simple matter of drag and drop to copy your files.

[Tellytubby]

Well, when I'm in Knoppix heres what the desktop displays:

Floppy

Hard Disk
[sda]

Hard Disk
[sdc1]

Trash

KNOPPIX

and another KNOPPIX icon a bit to the left.

The sdc1 is the usb flash drive I plugged in to try and transfer files to. I don't have a partitioned hdd. Still the way it came from the manufacturer. There isn't any hda1 on the screen.

A friend of mine said something along the lines of "knoppix doesn't get along well with ntfs"...could this be the reason I'm getting this error? Anyway, any more advice, much appreciated.

[Harry Kuhman]

Knoppix can read NTFS partitions just fine, but it isn't considered safe to write to them.

sda is not a partition, it's a hard drive. Since this is showing up and sda1 is not I suspect that you no longer have a valid partition on the disk. Assuming that you didn't already write to the ntfs partition with Knoppix, this still isn't a surprise; in my experience it's not just Knoppix that doesn't get along with ntfs - Windows doesn't seem to get along with it either. I have had 3 NTFS partitions destroyed by Windows in 3 years, two that I still can't recover. And from what I've seen of people coming here to try to recover data from NTFS partitions, it is a pretty common thing. Knoppix can often read data from a ntfs partition when windows can't, but obviously there can be cases where the data is so destroyed that even Knoppix can't help.

[Tellytubby]

ARGH!

Man, that really sucks.....guess I've learnt my lesson as far as backing-up goes...

So is there any other options I can try to get files off this thing? Someone told me about a program called getdataback, said he used it to recover some documents and pictures before. Thank you very much for the help you've given.

[Harry Kuhman]

You might want to look at the Linux Live CD Helix, which has a number of forensic recovery tools. But I don't have any great suggestions (as I say, I still have 2 ntfs disks that I can't recover files from, so I'm far from an expert here).

[TopFarmer]

Depending on just what the problem is, you can try running TESTDISK. If you have the latest version of Knoppix ,but can not tell you how it run it (my version is old and it does not work). It will fix problems in the partition table and volume boot record on FAT or NTFS drives.

(mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified.) problem is likely fixable with Testdisk.

[Harry Kuhman]

Yea, TopFarmer is giving good advice. I forgot about this, but there is also the gpart command that can sometimes recover a destroyed partition if the problem is a corrupt partition table and not a corrupt partition itself. See man gpart for details.

[Tellytubby]

Wow, thanks for the advice. So you recommend I try:

1. TESTDISK and then
2. gpart

Now I'm not very experienced in linux so I was wondering if you could give me a bit more information on just what testdisk and gpart are and how I should go about running them. I want to make sure I do it right. If you could possibly direct me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

Thanks, Andrew

*EDIT* Haha, i can't believe it was so simple...just then during boot of knoppix a line I hadn't seen before appeared saying: checking for hard disk partitions...something something..... any way the points is the partions are visible now on the desktop and I can access my files....YAY.

Thank you all very much for your great help. Knoppix has been a lifesaver!