Help! trying to save my files with linux...

vtohthree

Senior member
Apr 18, 2005
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Long story short, my Laptop HDD is broken or severely messed up. It will not boot, I get the "disk read error" message, and so I tried to put in the window's xp cd to repair it, but not to my surprise...the computer freezes or restarts as soon as the HDD light comes on.

SO....I got pclinuxOS and did liveboot from the cd. I was able to access the hard drive from there, but only some folders were accessible, others took forever to load until it got the message "stalled" or something.

I did manage to save one folder of family photo's, 8 megs took 34minutes to transfer onto my flash drive off of linux. It seems to be really slow since it's booting off of the cd...unless I'm wrong and its something else.


Anyways, I don't have time(regular hours when the store is open) to buy an enclosure and no I"m not going to order one either(I might not be home...blah blah, etc..)
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**YOU CAN IGNORE THE STUFF I WROTE ABOVE THE LINE, IMPORTANT QUESTION IS BELOW**

SO..I want to try something different...I want to TRY(keyword) and install pclinuxOS on to my hard drive and boot it off there while salvaging my files. I did a search but these oceans led me to reading abunch of specifics...

I was just curious if I need to do a small partition in order to install it?? (in all honesty I will probably attempt it anyways before anyone posts, esp since its 2:30a.m. eastern time)..

thanks all.
 

vtohthree

Senior member
Apr 18, 2005
701
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oh forgot to mention..for whatever reason, something is jacked up with my hdd, and I'm pretty desperate enough to try and boot linux from a broken hdd..yes..just to clarify the nonsense approach of my question...
 

bsobel

Moderator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Dec 9, 2001
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Don't install anything to that harddrive, every write decreases your chance of getting your data back.
 

vtohthree

Senior member
Apr 18, 2005
701
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Ok, I see, I didn't install it.


UPDATE...I got it to boot once, it took forever, for some strange reason it seems like my HDD is running reallllllllly slow and kind of spotty(doesn't run smoothly like it should, I hear the drive spinning and clicking on and off, like its taking breaks)...and I actually managed to get into windows(everything was horrendously slow, I can't even speak of it...maybe like 10 minutes to open "my computer".

I ended up flashing my bios back to an older version. Just before this started happening, I flashed to the newest bios release, but unfortunately switching back did nothing. Now its back to not booting again.."disk read error"
 

nweaver

Diamond Member
Jan 21, 2001
6,813
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not sure who to set this up with anything but my old gentoo cd, but a live CD that allows you to mount with DMA off is going to work better.
 
Nov 29, 2005
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agrees with the 2 person above..
1) use a LINUX LIVE-CD to copy your files to perhaps an external usb drive ( usb thumb drive, usb harddrive, etc) or to another computer harddrive via copy-to-network
2) try booting LINUX LIVE-CD with DMA=OFF, ACPI=OFF, APM=OFF, SCSI=OFF ( in short.... "failsafe" mode )
3) once you've copied your data to a medium (usb drives, network drives), you could use any LINUX LIVE-CD with GPARTED ( GPARTED have just release a bootable CD that is under 50MB !!) and "delete" and 'create' partitions.