Can't See Any of my Windows Files, Errors Mounting

[Harry Kuhman]

I think it's reading the SATA disk because it sees that single text file that is on it from the /FIXMBR command I ran when I had the Windows Recovery Console.

I just can't quite figure out what this is saying. /FIXMBR should not write any text file to anywhere on the disk, what it is intended to do is to replace the boot code part of the MBR with plain vanilla Microsoft boot code (which would, for example, remove grub or other third party boot loaders if they have been installed, or just plain replace the boot code if for some reason it's not there or corrupt. It should not change, replace or "fix" the partition table, which is the last 64 bytes of sector zero track zero cylinder zero, aka the MBR. Can you tell us more about this text file? It almost sounds like the drive has been directly written to, as would be a floppy or a USB flash drive, rather than a properly partitioned hard drive. If that's the case then gpart or testdisk will be essential to rebuild the partition table. The /fixmbr option would also restore the boot code, but I would expect that should make any text file on an unpartitioned hard drive vanish. You shouldn't need to run /fixmbr to read the disk with Knoppix, but you might need it in eventually recovering the disk for Windows use. The good news is that since modern hard drives contain so much space on cylinder zero, if the text file is reasonably small, you may not have damaged any or much data on the FAT partition if something did write to cylinder zero as if the disk wasn't partitioned. I'm at a loss on how that would have happened though, unless someone forced a Linux system to mount sda rather than sda1 and then wrote to it or formatted it.

[cbagger01]

If I remember correctly, gpart and testdisk need to be run against the entire drive device, not the mountpoint.

In other words:

/dev/sda

NOT

/media/sda1

[aurix]

I'm getting the same error on a Toshiba Satellite A55-1064 laptop. That is, /dev/sda exists, but /dev/sda1 doesn't exist, even though it should. The hard drive is listed as "40GB (5400 RPM); Enhanced IDE (ATA-6) hard disk drive." The MBR on the hard drive is not messed up. QTParted and GParted both report the hard drive as I expect (/dev/sda, with /dev/sda1 being the only partition and filling the entire drive). The partition has a windows install on it, and is NTFS. Windows can boot, but fails after about two minutes, still in the loading screen. I'm using the lastest knoppix cd.

[aurix]

dmesg | grep sda revealed

SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
 sda: <3>ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2
sda: Current: sense key=0xb
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda

I have no idea what this means or what to do next