lefenzy
Senior member
Hi all, there was a severe thunderstorm in our area a few weeks ago and a computer belonging to a friend of mine was hit by I guess a power surge. I have been trying to repair it.
From what I can tell, the damage was limited to hard drive corruption. The main windows partition had many errors. I tried:
1-Booting with an XP system disk I had and running recovery console. I could not find the main partition.
2-Trying the recovery console on board the system (it's a HP computer so it has recovery partitions). It gave an error and would not work.
3-Booting into a live CD of Ubuntu. Here I was able to mount the NTFS partition and view the files. I guess they were corrupted because a lot of the file sizes were 0. No you can't fsck NTFS from Linux : /.
My friend told me he had a Norton backup and gave me the disks so this was the go ahead to use the recovery partition on the computer hard drive to restore the system back to factory settings. It seemed the recovery partition wasn't affected so now the computer is bootable but all the files were lost. I have the backups. No problem right? I install the Norton 360 from a disk my friend gives me and I try the Restore function. It doesn't work--I have three backup disks and it doesn't recognize any of them. I don't know what's up, since these are the backup files. So the files are right there on the disks and I can't restore them. (The file names are jumbled encrypted type file names in folders, so manually restoring 3 DVDs of data would be impossible. Plus I can't open the files in windows although some of the files liike music and pictures could be opened in Ubuntu)
I try the Norton online chat support and the guy in India can't help, even with the remote desktop. He comes up with lame things like maybe disks corrupted or that Norton 360 1.0 doesn't support backups spanning multiple disks although the backup disks were created using Norton. After I reply with that, he goes silent for a minute or two and just ends the chat session.
So now I don't know how to get my friends files back. Any help is greatly appreciated.
From what I can tell, the damage was limited to hard drive corruption. The main windows partition had many errors. I tried:
1-Booting with an XP system disk I had and running recovery console. I could not find the main partition.
2-Trying the recovery console on board the system (it's a HP computer so it has recovery partitions). It gave an error and would not work.
3-Booting into a live CD of Ubuntu. Here I was able to mount the NTFS partition and view the files. I guess they were corrupted because a lot of the file sizes were 0. No you can't fsck NTFS from Linux : /.
My friend told me he had a Norton backup and gave me the disks so this was the go ahead to use the recovery partition on the computer hard drive to restore the system back to factory settings. It seemed the recovery partition wasn't affected so now the computer is bootable but all the files were lost. I have the backups. No problem right? I install the Norton 360 from a disk my friend gives me and I try the Restore function. It doesn't work--I have three backup disks and it doesn't recognize any of them. I don't know what's up, since these are the backup files. So the files are right there on the disks and I can't restore them. (The file names are jumbled encrypted type file names in folders, so manually restoring 3 DVDs of data would be impossible. Plus I can't open the files in windows although some of the files liike music and pictures could be opened in Ubuntu)
I try the Norton online chat support and the guy in India can't help, even with the remote desktop. He comes up with lame things like maybe disks corrupted or that Norton 360 1.0 doesn't support backups spanning multiple disks although the backup disks were created using Norton. After I reply with that, he goes silent for a minute or two and just ends the chat session.
So now I don't know how to get my friends files back. Any help is greatly appreciated.
