Recovering a XP SATA drive with Knoppix?

[Random Lee]

Hello folks,

New to the forum and to Linux, so please go easy! It's never easy being the noob!

Anyway, I wont beat around the bush... my problem is as follows:

I just got back from a weeks snowboarding holiday and my PC appears to have went kaput for no apparent reason.

I have two 160GB Western Digital SATA drives in the PC (spec at the bottom of my post in case it helps), one with the OS on it (BIOS reads as SATA 0... or System Drive as I called it) and one with "My Documents" on it (BIOS reads as SATA 2... or Media Drive as I called it). These drives are not in any form of RAID array as I removed that a few months ago and did a fresh install of XP (MCE 2005 to be be exact) on one of the drives (SATA 0).

Now everything was cool before I went away and it worked fine for a few weeks but when I came back from holiday and turned on my PC it gets to the XP loading screen and then hangs until I turn it off. I cant even get Safe Mode to work as it also hangs after loading in all the drivers and wot not. (I've yet to check Event Log to see if anything bad happened, will do tonight).

The only way I can get XP to boot is to disable my media drive (SATA 2) in the BIOS, or leave it enabled and simply remove the SATA cable.

I would have thought that SATA 2 was just broken but the weird thing is both HDDs are visible in the BIOS as 160GB Serial ATA drives and when I press F12 at boot and do the Hard Disk Diagnostic check both drives Pass.

I've swapped the SATA leads and also tried different SATA sockets on the mobo but the same thing always happens, XP hangs at the loading screen.

I cant go into Control Panel > Computer Admin either due to the fact that XP will not boot with SATA 2 attached and enabled and hot plugging doesnt seem to work with it.

I also tried SpinRite and various other HDD recovery tools but they fail to see the drive. The closest I got was using Symantec HDD recovery but that hung and returned a BSOD when it came to reading the dodgy drive (as does the XP installation disk when I try the repair through the Recovery Console, although I tried this before I realised it was my media drive that was knackered, not the drive with XP on it).

I then tried plugging the SATA cable in when the PC was already running XP but it didnt show up, although I'm pretty sure I could hear it trying to spin up.

As I said, the PC works fine with only SATA 0 connected... I just want some of the photos and music of it as my most recent back up was about a month ago. I think there's a glimmer of hope that it can be recovered as I have had 100% success recovering data from failed IDE drives in the past.

I think the drive should still be covered by the 3 years WD warranty anyway but I would really like to salvage some data before sending it back to them.

Anyone got any ideas? I downloaded Knoppix and it loads up fine from the CD but I'm pretty much stumped from there... I'm not even sure if the suspect drive displays in it.

I have just printed out the guide at the following website however I am currently at work so cant try it until I get home > www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

If you need me to provide more info just ask.

Any help would be much appreciated,

Cheers,

Lee

-------------------------------------
Dimension 9150
Pentium D 930 3.0GHz
2GB Corsair DDR2 RAM
XFX 7900GT Extreme
x2 WD 160GB HDD
160GB Icy Box External HDD
Hiper Type-R 530W PSU
SB X-Fi Xtreme
Windows MCE 2005
32" Hyundai Q321
19" Dell E196FP

[rcook]

You might try using the command line command fdisk /l (the lower case letter L). This will cause fdisk to access the drives and list the contents of their partition tables.

Depending on the results of that experiment, you may have lost the partition table of the drive and/or the descriptive data for the partition (i.e. FAT tables, old MS drives.) You might try using a command line copy using dd sent through a formatter to your screen to see if there is accessable data on the hard drive. You can treat the drive or a partition as a large block device and simply read a block or two to see if it is accessable. If it is there are techniques for forensic copies.

[TopFarmer]

Go to WD's web site and download their hdd test program , it it fails you very likely out of luck, if passes then there are other test/programs to try. If rcook's post info does not work.