"Could Not Mount Device" - Hard Drive Question

[Mr K]

I've looked through a lot of posts about this, but none of them seem to match the problem I'm having.

My hard drive crashed last week. The exact same error had happened a year ago with my last hard drive, so I decided to build a new computer. I've built that and it's all fine, but I'd still like a lot of data from my old hard drive. I tried a lot of solutions before, like Partition Table Doctor, EASEUS Data Recovery and Data Rescue PC but none of them worked. I read about Knoppix and decided to give it a try. Firstly, I tried loading it with just my current hard drive. It loaded up fine, and Knoppix opened the drive. Then I turned it off, plugged in my old hard drive, along with my current hard drive and it loaded up fine again. I got to the desktop, yet when I double clicked either hard drive, both of them gave me the following error:

Could not mount device
The reported error was:

And that's it. There was no error below it, it just had that.

I used XP and NTFS on my old hard drive.

If anyone could help then I'd much appreciate it, thanks a lot.

[slct]

I've looked through a lot of posts about this, but none of them seem to match the problem I'm having.

My hard drive crashed last week. The exact same error had happened a year ago with my last hard drive, so I decided to build a new computer. I've built that and it's all fine, but I'd still like a lot of data from my old hard drive. I tried a lot of solutions before, like Partition Table Doctor, EASEUS Data Recovery and Data Rescue PC but none of them worked. I read about Knoppix and decided to give it a try. Firstly, I tried loading it with just my current hard drive. It loaded up fine, and Knoppix opened the drive. Then I turned it off, plugged in my old hard drive, along with my current hard drive and it loaded up fine again. I got to the desktop, yet when I double clicked either hard drive, both of them gave me the following error:



And that's it. There was no error below it, it just had that.

I used XP and NTFS on my old hard drive.

If anyone could help then I'd much appreciate it, thanks a lot.

first run the
#fdisk
on your damaged HDD to know about the partitions & then run
#mount
to mount the that partition

[Jonathan183]

What happens if you boot the system from CD with only your old hard drive connected?
With only your old hard drive connected what is the output of

sudo fdisk -l

Have you tried manually mounting your old hard drive partitions ... if so how have you done this and what error messages are reported?
Also what does

mount

report?

[Mr K]

How do I run those commands?

I've never used Linux or Knoppix before, so I'm not really sure how to do what you're both suggesting.

Thanks for the replies.

[Mr K]

I can't even load Knoppix now, even though I've loaded it twice before on the same disc it's now not working on. It loads up to the console screen, does everything as normal then says:

Looking for CD in: /dev /hdf

That's my CD drive. Then after doing that for about 30 seconds it comes up with:

"Can't find Knoppix filesystem, sorry. Dropping you into a very limited shell. Press reset button to quit"

I thought I'd try burning another disc, so I burnt another disc at 4x speed, and it's doing the same. Any ideas? I just find it extremely weird how it's not working now after it worked fine with the same disc just a few hours before.

Also, it didn't work with the same hardware in as when it did work. The 2 times it did work, I had only my new hard drive in first, then the second time I had my old hard drive and new hard drive in. I tried it again with my old and new hard drive and it didn't work, then I tried it with just the new hard drive, and it still didn't work.

[Jonathan183]

How do I run those commands?

I've never used Linux or Knoppix before, so I'm not really sure how to do what you're both suggesting.

Thanks for the replies.

You should have been able to open a terminal and run the commands ...

Can you try the CD in another machine ?
Will the system boot from any other CD?

I'm not sure but it sounds as though something has been changed in BIOS to stop the system booting. Try with just one hard drive at a time for the moment and see if you can get the system to boot ... remove the power completely from the PC and leave it a minute or so before reconnecting also.

[Mr K]

You should have been able to open a terminal and run the commands ...

Can you try the CD in another machine ?
Will the system boot from any other CD?

I'm not sure but it sounds as though something has been changed in BIOS to stop the system booting. Try with just one hard drive at a time for the moment and see if you can get the system to boot ... remove the power completely from the PC and leave it a minute or so before reconnecting also.

Sorry about the slow reply.

I tried the CD in another machine and it didn't even get as far as the terminal part. It came up with the "Press enter to boot Linx" screen, then it went to a black screen and just stayed there.

My computer will boot from an XP CD.

Do you think I should try the DVD version of Knoppix?

[Mr K]

Haha, well, I tried the disc in my DVD drive and it worked. I'm not sure why I didn't try that in the first place, but anyway lol.

I'm going to try the mounting commands when I put my old hard drive in, in a couple of hours.

EDIT: For whatever reason, Knoppix doesn't like my CD drive being in the /hdf slot. That's why it read my DVD drive, because it was in the /hde slot. Yet when I put my CD drive in the /hde slot, as the IDE master, and my old hard drive in the /hdf slot, as the IDE slave, then my computer doesn't boot up.

So I'm going to have to buy a USB enclosure for my hard drive and then I'll give it another try.