Hi,

Background

My brother brought me an old Samsung WU 33205A HDD of 3.5 GB that suddenly stopped to work on his PC (WXP PRO).

The scope here is to save the data on that HDD.

I have installed it on my system with the intent to help him solving the problem.
My OS is WXP PRO.

My system has recognized that a new hw was about to be installed and found the proper driver.

If I browse explorer I cannot see the hdd, therefore I went into Device Manager and saw that the "device is working properly".
Then I clicked Disk Management and I read:

Disk 1
Unknown
3,01 GB
Not Initialized

3,01 GB Unallocated

It looks like the HDD needs to be formatted.

Knoppix & myself

I am totally new to Knoppix and I was suggested to try it as a possibility to recover the data from the Samsung HDD.
I succeeded to burn a Live DVD and booted my PC.

I can see the HDD on the desktop, as well as the other HDDs on my system, in fact, if I click on them, they open neatly, but when I get to the Samsung HDD, I get a message that I cannot quote with the exact words but more or less is: the drive cannot be mounted because the file system is unknown.

The only thing I can say from my investigations is that the file system is FAT32.

Now, I am stuck and have absolutely no clou how to proceed, but I am confident someone here will help

Thank you!

Alex