kriadtexas

Ok, he is my situation. I am new to Linux. I remembered someone many years ago showing me how to do a data recovery using Linux.
I am in desperate need of getting data off of a drive that has failed. Here is a little background.
I had a 100gb drive in my Dell laptop, n on July 4th the drive failed. It had to partitions on the drive, 1 was mainly for windows and programs, and partition 2 was for personal data and things. When the drive failed, I pulled it from the computer, put in another drive, and connected the failing drive to an external box. When in windows, the failing drive once powered up and connected, basically freezes everything until I disconnect. So I remembered someone showing me briefly how to use Linux, but I do not recall exactly how to do it.
So I downloaded Knoppix and set it up to run via VMware Workstation. Once knoppix is loaded, I plug in the failing drive and all my data is visible and accessible. So I plug in another empty external drive, to use to copy the files over to. I have done the read/write stuff as I have found on other posting, but when I go to create a new folder on the drive or copy the files over, it tells me that it is inaccessible. The drive I am trying to copy to was formatted NTFS under windows, and I have not been able to reformat it to fat32 or Linux-2 or LInux-3 using Partition Magic, it wont complete.
I am going crazy trying to figure out how to get this data off the failed drive and onto another drive so I can use it in windows.
ANY help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
c-

LlNUX

Hi kriadtexas,

> Once knoppix is loaded, I plug in the failing drive and all my data is visible and
> accessible.
Is this a USB disk which is failing?

Mounting NTFS under linux is not that easy as mounting fat partitions. Have you tried to boot to windows first and use admin tools to convert it to fat32 file system? Then boot to knoppix and mount it with mount command: linux commands Not sure how familiar you are with linux but you can do the same task in linux using cfdisk command:linux commands . once its ready use mount command: linux commands to mount that partition. Then plug in your other disk and copy files over ...

hope this helps

Jonathan183

I'm not sure what won't complete means - but I think FAT32 is limited to 32GB partitions in Windows XP and 2000 ... I think you have a couple of options, which one you take will depend on how confident you are with each OS:-
1. Enable Linux writing to NTFS partition using NTFS-3G - see link.
2. Format your target drive into acceptable size FAT32 partitions.
3. Install driver in windows to read Linux partitions and copy your data to a linux area (google windows linux reader).

I think the lowest risk is option 3 as this does not involve reformatting or changing partitions & uses an OS you are familiar with. You should be able to do option 2 using windows as well.

Hope this helps.