[SOLVED] Hard drive problems (URGENT!!)

[dbbolton]

I have an old Dell Dimension with some valuable data on the hard drive. After an unclean shutdown, I get this error at boot:

A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart.

It comes up every time, and I can't get in to Windows. I booted the XP disc and entered the recovery console to run this command
chkdsk /R
About a quarter of the way through, chkdsk told me that there were some unrecoverable errors.

Is there anyway that I can get the data off the hard drive?

I tried connecting the Windows hard drive to my Ubuntu hard drive as a slave, then mounting it from inside Ubuntu, but it didn't work as there were errors on the drive. mount told me to run 'chkdsk /f' but that is an invalid option, according to the XP cd.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

[scragar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Recovery-oriented_variants_of_dd

I'm sure one of those will be helpful, provided you've got an extra HD to store the info on as it's recovered. I don't think windows will like being moved about though, so you may need to reinstall.


Another thing you could try, would be placing the drive somewhere cold(freezer is a good choice) for a while, and trying it then, although this is unlikly to have much of an effect it could be enough to help.

[dbbolton]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Recovery-oriented_variants_of_dd

I'm sure one of those will be helpful, provided you've got an extra HD to store the info on as it's recovered. I don't think windows will like being moved about though, so you may need to reinstall.


Another thing you could try, would be placing the drive somewhere cold(freezer is a good choice) for a while, and trying it then, although this is unlikly to have much of an effect it could be enough to help.
Do you think that one of those programs would be helpful if I don't need to fix the system (ie, just want to get documents, pictures, etc) ?

[scragar]

The variant of the dd command that dd_rhelp uses would be very helpfull, since it will skip the bad section of the HD instead of failing to read it and throwing errors, it will then come back and try again to read the corrupt part until it has either read it or given up.
That looks to be your best chance of restoring any information on your HD.

[wolfen69]

try a puppy linux cd. you can get into any drive with it.

[dbbolton]

The variant of the dd command that dd_rhelp uses would be very helpfull, since it will skip the bad section of the HD instead of failing to read it and throwing errors, it will then come back and try again to read the corrupt part until it has either read it or given up.
That looks to be your best chance of restoring any information on your HD.

I'll give this a try first

try a puppy linux cd. you can get into any drive with it.

If I manage to boot a puppy linux cd, how will I get the files off the hard drive onto some other media?

Basically, I just want to get the 'My Documents' folder.

[Rhubarb]

If you are having similar problems to this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=858415
Please refer to my comment number 7:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5381899&postcount=7
Which fixed up the problem and allowed that person to mount and read from a problematic NTFS partition.

[dbbolton]

If you are having similar problems to this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=858415
Please refer to my comment number 7:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5381899&postcount=7
Which fixed up the problem and allowed that person to mount and read from a problematic NTFS partition.
This did sound similar to my problem, but when I tried your suggestion, I got the same error as the first time I tried to mount the drive:


# sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /bak -o force
Error reading $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to load $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows TWICE. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If you have SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for the details.

[Rhubarb]

In that case photorec (which can be found in the testdisk package in the ubuntu repos) is a very good command line based application that can restore photos, documents, and many other file types regardless of filesystem.
Type in man photorec for details of usage in Ubuntu.

[dbbolton]

In that case photorec (which can be found in the testdisk package in the ubuntu repos) is a very good command line based application that can restore photos, documents, and many other file types regardless of filesystem.
Type in man photorec for details of usage in Ubuntu.
Thanks for this suggestion, but the man page isn't very helpful:

PHOTOREC(1) Administration Tools PHOTOREC(1)

NAME
photorec - Recover lost files from harddisk, digital camera and cdrom

SYNOPSIS
testdisk [/log] [/debug] [/d recup_dir]

testdisk /list [/log]

DESCRIPTION
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost
files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom
and lost pictures (Photo Recovery) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec
ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it'll
work even if your media's filesystem is severely damaged or formatted.
PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or
memory support you are about to recover lost data from.

OPTIONS
/log create a photorec.log file

/debug add debug information


The broken NTFS is on /dev/sdb1 , so how would I go about restoring files from it to, say, /home ?

[Rhubarb]

Ok, it's not too hard thankfully, there are a few helpful hints about photorec scattered around the net.

Firstly, to get photorec working, you need to re-size your terminal window, as photorec requires at least 25 lines in a terminal window to work.

Then just:
sudo photorec /dev/sdb1
And follow the prompts.

More data recovery documentation can be found here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

And this website may be of assistance too:
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

[wolfen69]

those links are helpful, and appreciated, but the bottom line is, if you can't access your stuff with a live cd, your pretty much done. unless you have alot of money to give to a specialty (recovery) business, give it up.

[dbbolton]

I found a program called VirtualLab Data Recovery, and it is able to read files from the broken hard drive. Bad new is, I had to wipe my Ubuntu hard drive to install XP, and the program costs $40.

[dbbolton]

I ended up using photorec, once I realized that it was doing almost the same thing as VirtualLab Data Recovery, and that $40 only covered a 10MB quota (30GM is like $150).

So, I got about 5 GB of various files off the drive. the only problem is that now I have to go through 70 folders to sort and rename the files. It's a small price to pay next to professional data recovery though. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.