Recovering data from inaccessible drive

[vbishop]

I've searched the forums but have not found information that applies to my particular situation. I was using an external hard drive to store files. Much of what I have on the drive is backed up but a lot of it isn't. The drive fell from the pc tower it was sitting on and stopped operating correctly after that. It gives a "disk not formatted" error. Disk management still sees the drive but it remains inaccessible. I copied the drive using Norton Ghost to another external drive and have been attempting to recover off of this drive to no avail. I've gotten maybe 15gb of information of the 300 or so gb that have been used. This drive is giving the same error as the source drive when I try to access it using Windows, basically saying that it isn't formatted. It's my hope that using Linux might be able to circumvent the bad sectors of the drive that aren't allowing it to be recognized so that I can pull the most recent information off that was not backed up. I've not had a lot of luck figuring out how to use Knoppix to do this and help would be appreciated. I believe the version of Knoppix I'm using is 7.04 8-20-12 release date. I have a PC and Laptop and they are both running XP (XP Pro on the desktop). Thanks in advance to those that reply.

[Capricorny]

The general advice about Linux and Windows post-FAT file systems is, still, I think, that if you are not able to access the file system by ordinary mounting, Windows recovery tools are the next to try. If they don't help, you might look closer into Linux-based alternatives, but I don't think you should expect to find something easy to use. And if you do, please tell us about it! My guess in your case would be that you could recover a lot by going real low-level, but that could imply some serious coding work for you.

[Werner P. Schulz]

Try testdisk within Knoppix; but it isn't for inexperienced users.