Finding Vista HD when using Knoppix for data recovery...?

[JStevenson]

Whoa, I figured it out! Not sure if it was something I did but the most recent time I loaded the live cd, it put the stupid MyBook in the sdb1 slot and then I ran PhotoRec from the media directory instead of the home/knoppix directory. This time it showed me all the options in a way that made sense and I could even navigate to a specific subdirectory in MyBook to write the files. This was probably something really obvious to a Linux user...or even someone really familiar with command line stuff. In any case, PhotoRec is running!

So now I just cross my fingers and pray to the voodoo computer gods that it can find anything!

[JStevenson]

Just an update...Photorec is very slowly running, having many "error reading sector" messages. The estimated time fluctuates between 23000 hours and 31000 hours! Needless to say if it doesn't pick up pretty soon, I'll probably have to give up since several years is not realistic. But I might make another week or two. It is still in Pass 0, finally found 3 of 10 headers needed to begin...I'm crossing my fingers that it will find the other 7 needed headers and be able to get on with recovery before I lose my patience. My hard drive is in an external USB enclosure and I keep it sitting on freezer packs to keep it cool. Figure anything that reduces wear and tear on this physically failing drive is worth trying.

[rusty]

I admire your persistence. Especially the ice packs. Here's a page with links about hard drive hardware etc. to read whilst you wait for photorec to do it's thing.

http://repair4harddisk.org/disassembly_hard_drive.html

Who knows, you might want to start your own data recovery business.