jbclem said:
I have one hard drive on this computer and it's developed some serious problems. It's an IBM 40 GB hard drive, about 3 years old. There are three partitions:
C: 25GB NTFS
D: 5GB FAT32
E: 10GB NTFS
The D partition is accessible via Dos, and tests good (Spinrite, and
other programs). I had Win2000 installed on the C drive, WinXP on
the E drive. When I try to start the computer I'm receiving a Disk
Read Error, and other testing programs show both C and E drives as
bad. I'd like to install Windows 2000 on the good D drive and see
if I can recover some data.
This is a futile effort and you're wasting your time with that
installation I'm afraid. Hard disk is dying, and the more you do with
it the more errors you create on the disk that you wish to recover
from.
Indeed. This is an excellent job for a bootable Linux live CD. There
are a dizzying array of such CD's known collectively as "Knoppix"
CD's--all are based on the Linux operating system.
Now, assuming you have a functioning computer from which you're
posting that has a CD burner, download an ISO image of the CD and use
your CD recording program's "make disk from image" function with that
ISO to create the bootable CD.
One I'll recommend is System Rescue CD
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
Todd's Impromptu Mini Howto On recovering Windows files with System Rescue CD
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Concept: once you boot the CD, you can mount the dying drive and its
partitions as read-only and then copy data off of it onto an external
drive (usb hard disk, usb thumb drive, etc).
So, boot the CD. Hopefully your computer is setup to boot from a
CD-ROM. If it's not, play with BIOS settings to make it happen.
At the scary looking initial boot: prompt, just hit enter. You'll see
a bunch of fun text as Knoppix/Linux figures out your hardware and
does generally the right thing.
Next is the keymap selection: prompt. Enter 41 for us english and hit
enter. More fun text goes by.
At last you end up at the hallowed linux bash command prompt, auto
logged in as user root (the adminstator ID of linux). At that prompt,
do these commands. The commands start after the % sign. We're makin a
directory as a mount point, mounting your dead drive to that mount
point changing directories to that mount point and doing the linux
equivalent of "dir" there:
root@sysresccd /root % mkdir /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % cd /mnt/myharddisk
root@sysresccd /root % ls
If you see a directory listing of your c: drive, praise Jesus cus yer
readin that damaged drive with another operating system. Pat self on
back because I don't care how many times you've done it, it just feels
cool.
Okay, we can read your disk, now we need somewhere to copy it to.
Grab your favorite USB drive (external hard disk, flash thumb drive,
whatever). It makes life a lot easier if it's formatted FAT rather
than ntfs.
When you plug it in, look on the screen for some messages. Oh maybe
10 lines worth. If it says
SCSI device sdb: blah blah
sdb: blah
sdb: blah ...
If it says sdb like that, then that's the name the system has given to
your newly inserted usb drive. Its first (and probably only)
partition is gonna be /dev/sdb1. We'll use that in the next commands.
Note that if it says sdc or sdd or whatever, modify that third letter
in the mount command below accordingly.
So let's make a mount point for the external drive, and then mount it
so we have somewhere to copy our data to:
root@sysresccd /root % mkdir /mnt/myusbdrive
root@sysresccd /root % mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/myusbdrive
If you wanna verify your work up to now, the mount command should list
/mnt/myusbdrive and /mnt/myharddisk among its mounted devices. Try
it:
root@sysresccd /root % mount
Now we're ready to do some file copying. Now if you wanna try to copy
the whole stinkin c drive to the external drive and have the space
time and patience, go for it:
root@sysresccd /root % cp -R /mnt/myharddisk/* /mnt/myusbdrive
and wait a long time.
But, I'd recommend being more granular because it is a damaged disk
and the likelihood of encountering errors trying to copy the whole
partition is pretty darned high. So for example, to go after My
Documents, do:
root@sysresccd /root % cp -R /mnt/myharddisk/Documents\ and\ Settings/YOURUSERNAME/My\ Documents /mnt/myusbdrive
And it'll copy your MyDocuments directory over the usbdrive. Notice
the back slashes before the spaces in Windows stupid fiel/directory
names. You need those. and notice that directory delimiters in linux
are forward slashes rather than backslashes. The cp command is the
"copy files" command.
Now, if you wanna poke around the failed disk and look for more
goodies to grab, you'll need to only know the unix commands
cd to change directory,
ls to list directory contents and the
cp command to copy. The -R switch of the cp command says
"recursively copy all stuff under that directory too"
man command to read the documentation on these commands or any other.
e.g. "man ls" will show you all about the ls command.
Welcome to your (perhaps) first Linux experience. Tell em Todd sent ya.
Now, if you run into problems, please don't email me.
I will try to be helpful if you post in this thread in the newsgroup,
however, as time permits. Caveat: I have a relatively fresh baby
human around here, and you, as nice a person as I'm sure you are,
aren't my priority.
I hope this helps! Give it a go! There are other ways to skin this
cat such as removing your hard disk and putting it into another
computer, but, that's just not as fun.
Best Regards,
