Okay so long story short, I sent my laptop into BestBuy to get the AC pin fixed. It came back and within a few days it wouldn't let me use the computer and said my copy of Vista was an invalid copy. After going back and forth between Gateway and Geek Squad; a GS Rep said my only other option is to re-install Vista which in turn wipes all the files I have on this hard drive.

Now the GS Rep personally recommended that I use Ubuntu to access the drive so I can copy my files onto my External Hard drive.

I downloaded ubuntu and burned to a cd of which I am running off of right now.

The Problem. It wont let me access my harddrive and pops up this error message

Logfile indicates unclean dhutdown (0,1) failed to mount '/ dev/sda2': Operation not supported Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action: Choice 1: if you have windows then disconnect the external devices by clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows taskbar then shutdown windows cleanly. Choice 2: If you don't have windows then you can use 'force' option for you own responsibility. For example type on the command line: Mount -t ntfs-3g/dev/sda2/media/disk -o force or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file: /dev/sda2/media/disk ntfs-3g force 0 0

Now I thought that meant restart my windows and then shut it down properly.

Tried that and it didn't work. Now I use to be able to log on Vista it would show me a window where I could buy a valid key of vista and that was all.

Now all it says is "failed to start" everytime I try to log into my user prof.

So Im stuck here wondering if I could try and "Force" Ubuntu to work or try to install it hoping it wont wipe my files.

Help me please

Hi,

I'm looking for some boot options for the latest 8.10 CD.

Specifically, I'd like to turn off DMA, as I'm getting what look like DMA errors on a failed drive (SATA), and the boot process never finishes.

Thanks!

Hi,

after a Windows crash Ubuntu performed a filessystem check and since then Windows won't boot anymore. This happened on a friends machine so I don't know exactly what he did.

The weird thing is that not even a Windows-CD will boot anymore. I tried all Windows (XP) CDs I could find and they all crash as soon as you press SPACE and they start analyzing the hardware.

I think this has something to do with the way Ubuntu works with extended partitions and I also found an easy way to reproduce the problem:

- get a SATA-drive that is not used anymore and clear its MBR with dd
- use gparted to create a primary NTFS partition and some logical linux partitions inside an extended partition
- gparted will ask you what type of bootrecord you wish to use.. I went with the default (MSDOS)

At this point no computer in which I put this SATA-drive will boot a Windows-CD (as long as there's no additional IDE-drive connected). The only way to make the drive work again with windows is to clear the MBR with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1" and create at least one partition with the Windows install CD.

Now my friends computer is full of data and he doesn't want to reinstall everything (he has backups, though). So I'm looking for a way to get a new Windows installation without having to repartition the harddrive.

A nice soul on launchpad.net suggested the following (and I'm interested what you think):
- backup mbr
- clear mbr
- use testdisk to restore partition tables and hope for the best

Anyway.. when I ran sfdisk -V to check the extended partitions it gave me the following output and I wonder if there is a way to fix this:
# sudo sfdisk -V
partition [6]: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,0,1)
partition [7]: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/sda: OK

Any ideas or further comments would be greatly appreciated!

Hello,

First time poster here. My hard drive bit the dust today. As soon as I realized it was going under (getting messages from Windows telling me one file after another had been lost) I shut the computer down knowing that failure to do so would result in more data loss and knowing that I might not be able to reboot. I was right, not able to reboot.

First thing I tried was an XP repair installation but the installer failed to find the OS so I knew I was in trouble. This is uncharted territory for me.

There are certain files (i.e. PST files) that I *MUST* recover. I suspect that if I pop the drive into a USB enclosure I'll be able to see many of my files and recover them onto another drive, but I fear I will do more damage in the process and possibly corrupt the files I need to save.

So my plan is to make an image of the failing drive onto a new drive with ddrescue. Then copy my most important files from the new image onto a third drive. Then try to boot from the newly-copied image. And if that doesn't work try chkdisk /r on the copied image to see if that helps.

Does that sound like a sound strategy?

Assuming it is a good strategy I need some help with ddrescue as I'm not well versed in Linux.

Could someone give me a quick step-by-step on getting the image made? I assume I need the command lines to mount the failed drive (still connected via IDE), mount the target drive (connected by external USB drive enclosure) and finally run the command to copy from the internal drive to the external USB drive with the log option turned on.

Also, is there any way to safely salvage some of my files that may be readable before making the image? This is my work computer and I'm eager to get back up and running ASAP. Getting the PST files would be a big first step.

I will be booting from the ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10 live CD.

I am so thankful that this tool exists because it sounds like it's exactly what I need. I just wish I was better versed in Linux so I could make more sense out of all the online resources I've come across.

TIA

Hi there,

What the easier way to unformat a NTFS partition? I tryed testdisk but he only finds the new (empty) partition created by the Windows XP install.
I need to know the folder tree of the previus partition, not just get the files (I already got then using photoget).

Thx in advance.

-- Roberto

Hi,

I had a problem with my iPod, which I thought was caused by a hardware fault. After trying all other suggestions, I had to reformat it in Windows.

I haven't done anything with it since then and I don't have a backup of the data.

Is there any way that I can recover the data using the Ubuntu Rescue Remix?
If so, can anyone point me to any detailed tutorials?

Since the iPod has been reformatted, I can't see any data on it, however, I understand that I should make an image of the drive. How can I do that, when there is no visible data?

I'm fairly competent at executing Linux commands, even if I don't always know what I'm doing.
Any assistance would be much appreciated!
Thanks.

XP Home, I was running the live cd and fooled with the partitioning tool. Boink, turned it into unallocated space. Backups, who needs steenking backups?

I'm going to raw write the hdd to another, if I have to recover the data the hard way.

Reinstall the windows installation exactly as it was, this will be to the exact original hdd. Which will be a utility FAT partition and a NTFS (C:) partition.

Copy that mbr. Rewrite the saved/ damaged mess to the hdd. Then insert the saved mbr.

Is there a chance this will work? Thank you.

Hello

Looking for a program to recover my data.

My old partition schema entailed the following file-systems;

NTFS
Ext3
FAT32
HFS+

Although I didn't have anything of value on the ext3 partition, so don't worry about finding a software that can recover ext3. Most important is NTFS. Seconded by HFS+.

I've seen a whole spectrum of software's, and tried a few of them.

Winternals Disk Commander 1.1

Media Tools 5.1 Professional - http://www.prosofteng.com/products/media_tools_pro.php

But neither seem to be able to do exactly what I want. Biggest issue is that neither can write to NTFS.

Also tried TestDisk... but can't seem to work out how to use it.

Please help me recover my deleted partitions.

Thanks in advance,

Panarchy

PS: If you were wondering how they got deleted, blame the new ubuntu installation.

Hello andrew,

I have a damaged drive that is nearly full with music files (mp3s). It belongs to a DJ and I need to get his files back quickly. The drive is 500GB is size. The drives (damaged and recovery) are connected to the computer via USB adapters.

What settings or parameters would you use when issuing the ddrescue command for this task? Assume the drive has lots of sector errors and that most of the files are 4-10 MB in size.

I need to pull an image quickly so I can start Photorec on it and get back the MP3s. I ran ddrescue for two days with the following command, but only have 4GB so far. As a test, I ran Photorec against the partial recovery image and got back lots of working MP3s. So the data is definitely intact, it's just going very slowly.

My command
sudo ddrescue -v -d -n /dev/Damaged_Drive /Media/Recovery_Drive/image.img /Media/Recovery_Drive/image.log

Also, this morning I checked on the recovery process to discover the following message:

ddrescue: write error: File too large

Any ideas? Please tell me how I can make a quick image? At this rate it could take longer than a month.

I just started to use Ubuntu about 4 months ago and I love it. I have also been delving into the Unix Sun OS based world. I was working on a machine that uses Unix and some wingnut tripped the circuit breaker mid stride of the Unix tool. Now the hard drive is kind of loud and won't boot up. I don't have any boot/rescue disks as this is a "new project" type of thing.

I have removed the hard drive from the computer that it was in, and tried to connect it to the machine I have that runs Ubuntu....when I do plug it in before I boot up, it asks for a boot disk, if I let Ubuntu start up and I am at the desktop in Ubuntu, when I plug the hard drive in, it locks up the computer....when I unplug, it immediatly releases the lockup and I can go on my merry way.

Is there a way to get the data off of this Unix hard drive? I would like to recover the files on there just to see if it can be done.

Thanks!

Milkman