Need to find my "C" drive on bricked Windows machine...

[eiguapo]

Backstory: My Windows 7 is bricked. I have two SSDs on the machine: the "C" drive with my OS, antivirus, etc... and a "P" drive for programs. On top of that I have four HDDs set up in a RAID 10 for data.

My problem is either related to a virus or to AVG-- it's the AVGIDSEH.sys stall upon start-up issue for those familiar. Basically Windows stalls on startup and eventually reboots... and on and on.

I saw that one person beat this issue by running Slax from a USB and then renaming a couple of specific AVG files, then rebooting, starting in safe mode and uninstalling AVG all together. So, having tried several other approaches, I made a bootable USB for Slax, and I'm FINALLY looking at something. Progress!

Now the trick is this-- I can see the former "P" drive and that's it. I can't see the RAID drive, which didn't surprise me. But I can't see the former "C" drive either.

Can somebody please take this Linux newbie by the hand and tell me how to figure out the source location of my "C" drive and then how to mount that so I can see it in Slax?

Secondary to that-- is there any way to get to the files on my RAID? Unfortunately I have an important work file on there that I need to get to asap.

My little head is pounding from all of this-- I'm barely staying afloat. Any help would be so appreciated. Thanks!

[scathefire]

Sounds like software RAID, and if that's the case the OS managed it. Which is probably not what you wanted to hear. I don't deal with software RAID, but there maybe a solution out there for you.

Most likely your drive is a /dev/sd*.

cd /dev/
ls -la | grep sd

a, b, c, d, etc. all correspond to disks that it sees. The numbers indicate a partition.

[Roxoff]

How old is the Slax image you're using? Windows 7 contains its own extensions to the NTFS file system, and you might want to be sure that you've got the latest changes to the NTFS filesystem drivers in your live CD by using the very latest version of the image that you can find.

It might help you to identify the drive if you list them all - fdisk can help here:

# /sbin/fdisk -l

that parameter is a lower case L character, btw.

That should produce a list of the drives and their partition layouts. If your P: drive is visible then you should be able to see that in the list, and your raid 10 devices should be listed but unrecognised. With a little luck, there will be one more drive that isn't any of the others - and that'll be your system drive.

[scathefire]

Going along with what Roxoff said, I would recommend using some like SystemRescueCD. Its never let me down.

SystemRescueCd

[atreyu]

I second the use of SystemRescueCd, it's a real bacon-saver.

As this is a Windows issue, you might have luck with Bart's PE builder. It's kind of like SystemRescueCd for Windows (but not nearly as good). Still, it might give you access to that RAID 10 data.

[eiguapo]

Thanks so much for the responses you guys. Last night I installed Windows on a spare hdd and when I hooked the rest of the drives back up, much to my relief, the RAID was still recognized.

However this isn't an ideal solution as I have a lot of graphics programs and fonts and whatnot that I'll have to reinstall (and in some cases locate). So I think what I'm going to do is get all of my personal files off the machine-- get them backed up on an external drive. Then I'm going to try some of your suggestions with the original OS drive.

Despite the circumstances I was actually enjoying the process of "breaking into" my machine with Linux. So I'd like to continue exploring that without the pressure of recovering my personal files. I'll definitely check out SystemRescueCD. (and I believe I was using the latest version of Slax)

Thanks again!

[PhilB]

I'm probably way off course with this, but have you seen this:


forums.avg.com/ww-en/avg-forums?sec=thread&act=show&id=132999#post_132999

Add the usual h t t p : / /

Phil