Need some help exploring my hardrive useing ubuntu live cd.

[j1234]

First of all let me explain my situation.
My computer Froze again the other day but this time i got frustrated and hit it > it went beeeep > and then died.

i have a toshiba laptop which runs windows vista.

when i turn it on all i get is a black screen with:
Unable to load operating system.

I Have a Ubuntu live cd which i am running to try to view my harddrive files.

basicly i want to put all files from my hardrive onto a external hardrive befor i use the vista reovery cd.

Here is the result from sudo fdisk -l:

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 7458 58368000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 7458 14594 57314296 7 HPFS/NTFS


Ill check back tommorow when i can to answer any questions or say thank you to the person who solves my problem.

just so you know there may be no solution, there is a possibility that the hardrive is just broke, which means i have to put it in the shop.

Thanks for trying to help.......... Jay

[the dsc]

I don't really know, but I guess that if your ubuntu is recent enough, it may have some easy way to mount any disk, just by clicking. If not, then you'd need some mount command.

But I think it's more likely that you'll be able to access a failing NTFS partition from a machine running windows than linux. As NTFS isn't native, linux isn't really prepared to deal with this sort of exceptional situation. That is, assuming that there is something wrong with the partition "structure", not something more mundane, like a file that was accidentaly deleted (or deleted by a virus) hindering windows start-up.

Some time ago I was having a lot of trouble with an external NTFS drive on linux, but sometimes just by connecting on windows the problem almost disapeared, it accessed the disk as if there was nothing wrong. Oddly enough, first there was some problem accessing it from windows, but it was easily accessed from linux, as if the problem didn't exist. Crazy stuff.

[rokytnji]

Howdy and Welcome to the forum. Use This Link for Transfering Files Using Live CD.

[j1234]

Thanks for this rokytnji but im having trouble.

i get up to running the command:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force

but it says:

ntfs-3g: failed to access volume dev/sda1 '/dev/sda1 ' : no such file or directory.

you can see the result of sudo fdisk -l which does state /dev/sda1.

but when i double click the mass storage device and the "unable to moun location can't mount file" box appears there is no details tab so i cant replace /dev/sda1 with the result in the fist step.

Please help..... Thanks, Jay

[devils casper]

/dev/sda1 is marked as unknown and its size is very small too. I don't think its a good idea to force mount this partition because it looks like a Recovery Partition only.

Isn't there any option at startup to Recover OS? Your Hardware vendor must have provided you some CD/DVD to use that Recovery Partition on OS failure.

[j1234]

Yes but recovery of startup files Fails, i tried this a few times but each time it faild and now it only shows:

Unable to load operating system screen.

and i have the vista restore cd which i have used many times,but its retart to factory settings, and i Cannot lose the files ofn the hardrive.

also i have also tried /dec/sda 2 & 3. it fails the same.

[devils casper]

Its really easy to backup files using Ubuntu LiveCD. Boot up from Ubuntu CD and execute sudo fdisk -l command in Terminal. Post output here.

sudo fdisk -l

* Its samll L in fdisk -l.

[j1234]

It was in my first post:

Here is the result from sudo fdisk -l:

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 7458 58368000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 7458 14594 57314296 7 HPFS/NTFS

[devils casper]

Execute this

sudo umount /dev/sda2
sudo umount /dev/sda3
cd /media
sudo mkdir sda2 sda3
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2  /media/sda2 -o defaults,umask=0
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3  /media/sda3 -o defaults,umask=0

Check /media/sda2 and sda3 folders.

[j1234]

Ok Thanks, ill try this tommorow then post my results.