teslamaster1
Junior Member
The hard drive in my laptop just died and there is some information that I would REALLY like to get off of it. Normally I make backups of things, but I just upgraded my desktop and put all of the files from the old desktop on my laptop, which died a few days later. What are the chances? Anyway, I have tried a lot of things to get the data off and just about exhausted my recovery knowledge. By the way, I don't want to fix the drive at all, just get the data off of it.
So far I have mostly used knoppix to try to recover things. I have obviously just tried to mount the drive and copy things to a usb drive, but I can't do it at this point. When I boot knoppix it recognizes that the drive is there (hda1 is on the desktop), but I can't mount it. When I try I get an error that says it can't do it after a REALLY long time trying. The error says:
"Could not mount device
The reported error was:
Failed to read $MFTMirr : Input/output error
Couldn't mount device '/dev/hda1' : Input/output error
Mount Failed".
My best guess is that the master boot record or the partition tables are corrupted, but this is just a guess. My next best guess is that the stepper motor is dead, which would mean I'm pretty much screwed, so at this point I'm going to say that isn?t the problem (mostly because I don?t want it to be...).
While in knoppix I have tried to run TestDisk, but TestDisk doesn?t even recognize that the drive or partition is there. There is only one partition listed when I run it and all of the files are knoppix files so I think that is just the knoppix DVD especially since it is 4143MB. It doesn?t see any of the other drives including the USB drive I was going to copy things on to (this might be just because it is USB).
I have also tried running PhotoRec in knoppix. This proved to have the same problem as TestDisk did. I guess its possible that I am running these two programs wrong, but they are both seemed pretty straightforward to me.
At this point I would be happy for any help that I can get. I would be glad to give any of you more information if you want it. Thank you in advance for any help.
Charles
So far I have mostly used knoppix to try to recover things. I have obviously just tried to mount the drive and copy things to a usb drive, but I can't do it at this point. When I boot knoppix it recognizes that the drive is there (hda1 is on the desktop), but I can't mount it. When I try I get an error that says it can't do it after a REALLY long time trying. The error says:
"Could not mount device
The reported error was:
Failed to read $MFTMirr : Input/output error
Couldn't mount device '/dev/hda1' : Input/output error
Mount Failed".
My best guess is that the master boot record or the partition tables are corrupted, but this is just a guess. My next best guess is that the stepper motor is dead, which would mean I'm pretty much screwed, so at this point I'm going to say that isn?t the problem (mostly because I don?t want it to be...).
While in knoppix I have tried to run TestDisk, but TestDisk doesn?t even recognize that the drive or partition is there. There is only one partition listed when I run it and all of the files are knoppix files so I think that is just the knoppix DVD especially since it is 4143MB. It doesn?t see any of the other drives including the USB drive I was going to copy things on to (this might be just because it is USB).
I have also tried running PhotoRec in knoppix. This proved to have the same problem as TestDisk did. I guess its possible that I am running these two programs wrong, but they are both seemed pretty straightforward to me.
At this point I would be happy for any help that I can get. I would be glad to give any of you more information if you want it. Thank you in advance for any help.
Charles
