Ack! I cant get to my harddrive.

Ranger Rick

Alright I threw this up in Games and Technology but it slipped between the cracks so I'll let H/A take a crack at at.

Well my computer of 6 years or so has finally died, it has reached the point where I no longer feel upgrading and repairing is a wise use of my money. I am fairly certain the only problem is the psu is dead but I would like to avoid spending any more money on this machine. Now I am faced with the challenge of retrieving data off of the computers drive. This seemingly trivial task is turning into quite an event. The 120 gig western digital drive from my machine has an oem copy of windows on it which, I learned rather quickly, prevents me from simply placing it into another computer and booting up. I have an even older computer (with a non compatible psu, but good idea) which I have attempted to place this drive in as a slave with the older machines 40 gig seagate as master but I am still getting non system disk errors. I have been loading into ubuntu and knoppix via live cd hoping to gain access to the drive but I must admit I am not particularly well versed in linux and could not find any drives to mount. When I remove the 120 gig drive and leave only the original 40 gig drive ubuntu and knoppix both mount the drive fine and I am able to browse the contents but as soon as the 120 gig drive is added I am unable to mount any drive. I have tried putting the hdds in cable select and setting them to master and slave respectively to no avail.

If anyone could shed some light on this situation I would be forever grateful.

bowen

If you get "non-system disk error" you're most likely dealing with a bad drive. The only way it could get worse is with a click.

However, when you boot into Linux with this drive only attached. Use this command "ls /dev/sd*" and tell me what happens.

At this point you'll be able to do something like:

"mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/myWindowsDrive/ -o force" and get into it.

Tofystedeth

Yeah, the oem drive thing shouldn't be an issue. You can't just toss it into another computer if it is win2k or XP because the hardware has changed. It sounds like a bad disc. I've had similar things happen where bad discs would screw up windows booting even as slaves. Listen to bowen. I say this as if he is right, but mostly because I know very little about linux and he sounds right.

AeonNightmare

I have a similar problem, my drive has nearly died but the computer still recognizes it and says I should back up the data before it fails completely, but... i can't boot into it. So, i got another HD, installed XP onto it and updated it and such, then made the old bad HD the slave to the new HD. Only problem is, when i boot into the new HD, i can't access the old HD because of errors. Any suggestions of what i can do to get at least some of my info off the bad HD?

Ranger Rick

Per request.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo ls /dev/sd*
ls: cannot access /dev/sd*: No such file or directory

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/myWindowsDrive/ -o force
ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda1': No such file or directory

And the help file suggested this

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo  ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/win -o force
ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda1': No such file or directory

I cant imagine either one of those are good signs.

bowen

Ranger Rick wrote: »

Per request.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo ls /dev/sd*
ls: cannot access /dev/sd*: No such file or directory

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/myWindowsDrive/ -o force
ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda1': No such file or directory

And the help file suggested this

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo  ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/win -o force
ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda1': No such file or directory

I cant imagine either one of those are good signs.

No, it's not. Try 'ls /dev/hd*'.

Does BIOS pick up the drive correctly? You shouldn't need sudo with ls, btw.

Ranger Rick

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ls /dev/hd*
ls: cannot access /dev/hd*: No such file or directory

Also, In BIOS I couldn't find anything about the drive.

bowen

It's gone my friend. Sorry. You may have luck with a professional service, but I suspect that there's nothing that important on there.

Ranger Rick

Bummer. Well thanks for the help.