Rescuing windows with knoppix

**smoiu** · 08-20-2008, 11:24 AM

Hi, a friend of mine recently asked me to look at her windows xp home laptop which was running very slowly and had all sorts of pop-ups. After using the usual hijack this etc to clean out the spyware i saw she hadn't updated windows at all and wasn't running an anti-virus. The laptop was running nicely at this point and so i installed AVG and ran windows update. The usual 'windows needs to restart' bit popped up so obviously i did, only on rebooting there was nothing, just a black screen. I couldnt get into safe mode either, all it gave me was the "load needed dlls kernel" error. first step to try and fix this was to run chkdsk /r /p from the windows disc, but it got to around 25% and gave me an error message, saying that the file system is too damaged. Likewise the bootfix's from the windows disk did nothing. Next thought was this would need a reinstall of windows over the top of the old version to get into windows without loosing everything, but windows does not recognise an installation on either partition (there is one main partition and another 6GB one which is the usual packard bell 'recovery partition'). So i can't reinstall windows without formatting and it turns out she doesn't have any of her work backed up, important stuff which she 'needs'. I would leave this as a lesson for her to backup but as it was me who ran the windows update i can't help but feel partly responsible there.

Obviously i want to try and get the data off the main partition before formatting and i've used knoppix a number of times on computers to do just that, however when i boot from the cd on this laptop the only disk that is available is the 6GB 'recovery partition' and there is no sign of the main disc within the system. I'll be honest here my linux knowlage is pretty pathetic, i have ubuntu on my main pc but i rarely venture into the more technical side of things. It seems like i need to mount the other partition but i'm unsure where to find out the name of the other partition to mount it, i thought they were meant to just appear on the desktop and then you could mount them from there but as far as knoppix is concerned there is no other partition, only the rescue one. The tool testdisk sounds like a possible solution but when i try and run it i get "error loading shared libraries: libntfs.so.9: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory. I assume this is because it is ntfs, can knoppix not read that at all?

I've read a ridiculous amount of guides in the last few days trying to sort it out but she needs some of the data for tomorrow and i'm really running out of ideas so any help would be really appreciated. I have large external hard drives i can copy the data accross to but the fact that even knoppix can't see the partition really worries me.

Thanks a lot in advance for any help or advice you can offer me!

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-20-2008, 11:36 AM

Originally Posted by smoiu

.... I assume this is because it is ntfs, can knoppix not read that at all?

Knoppix can read NTFS just fine. Many of us, including myself, believe that Knoppix can not safely write to NTFS.

**smoiu** · 08-20-2008, 11:53 AM

ok, so that's not the reason it's not recognising the partition then, any suggestions as to how i can get into it? I've tried

mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

But i get 'you must specify the file system' so i'm obviously not using it right, is it normal for knoppix to not recognise partitions on the desktop as soon as it boots though? All my drives are directly on the desktop when i boot to it from my machines.

**smoiu** · 09-19-2008, 12:28 PM

I had to stop looking at this laptop for a while due to lack of time but i've just picked it up again and now i've tried running testdisc, which said everything was ok and then

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

as according to fdisk -l hda is the main windows partition, but after trying that i get

failed to access '/dev/hda2' no such file or directory
Error opening partition device: no such file or directory
failed to startup volume: no such file or directory
failed to mount /dev/hda2 no such file or directory

Any help would be appreciated.

**kirol** · 09-19-2008, 01:33 PM

Originally Posted by smoiu

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

as according to fdisk -l hda is the main windows partition

I take it you mean "hda2"? Are you sure your mount point (/mnt/hda2) exists; on modern knoppix that would probably be /media/hda2. Anyway you can create your own temporary mount pt, e.g:

Code:

 # mkdir /tmp/M
 # mount -o ro -t ntfs /dev/hda2 /tmp/M

To clear the NTFS fud a little: the older ntfs driver is unsafe for writing, which is why it should only be used in conjunction with a read-only mount (as shown). If you need to write to your NTFS partition, replace "ntfs" above with "ntfs-3g" and obviously drop the "ro" option. To parapharase yet contradict Harry, many of us have used it with no ill effect. It is just unfortunate that the default is still the old and unsafe driver.

**ventsyv** · 09-20-2008, 01:55 AM

I'm having the same problem, Knoppix Live CD does not recognize my HDDs. The HD is OK, it tries to boot Windows Server 03, but it hangs, I'm able to access it through the recovery console.
Knoppix however only maps /dev/hda to /cdrom . It does not find any HDDs. Now this thing is running RAID 5. Any ideas ??