I had my C: drive fail. I couldn't even get directory listing at repair recovery console. chkdsk -p told me there are unrecoverable errors. I then burnt Knoppix on a CD and booted off of it. I can see the different folders in C: but "my documents" is locked (stupid me - I must have set protection on it by accident). Hence I proceeded to prepare UBCD for windows. It booted fine and I see

B: 96MB NTFS
C: (unrecognized)
D:112 GB NTFS

What now? I clicked on explorerXP. It took a long time for it to show up and I don't even see C in it. I guess I will have to go back to knoppix and find a way to take ownership of files.

My DELL machine also started printing a message during bios that "the C drive is operating outside of its specifications". I don't know what else to do. I am kicking my self for not backing up my files

Open a command prompt window and type "chkdsk c: /f /r"

Be prepared to let it run for several hours (don't shut it off if it stays at the same spot for a long time).

Reboot and go back into ubcd4win and do the same thing (chkdsk c: /f /r). It shouldn't take as long but it'll still take quite a while. Hopefully the filesystem will be recognized this time after this.

After it's finished, open ExplorerXP and hopefully you can see your files. If you can see them and you have a seperate cd burner (other than the boot drive) or a usb stick/drive, backup your important information before trying to reboot into windows.

Hope this helps.

Tom

I had done chkdsk -p and after long time it quit at 30% saying it found unrecoverable errors. I can however see folders in knoppix (though access is slow). However in linux I am not able to mount this in read/write - I followed all advice for captive NTFS - nothing worked. If I finally succeed mounting this drive as R/W, it complains "stale NFS file handle" when I do a "ls" or if I do df -hl it says "operation not permitted". I can mount it only in read only mode and I can't look into many folders which are locked. copying those that I can see is extremely slow.

Also doing a ls -l showed the system disk was full. May be this is what killed it. (I always had 8GB empty space - don't how it got full suddenly). But I can't delete anything in it as I can't mount it read/write in linux. In Windows I can't see that partition.

Linux can usually bail you out with the (unrecognized) filesystem problems but unfortunately it doesn't have stable read/write support. Captive-NTFS does though I've never had success using it with locked/encrypted files.

I don't really know what to suggest but to image the drive (with dd in linux) if you have really important data on it and hope to find a utility that works under linux/wine to decrypt your files.

Only a smart-ass would suggest backing up your encrypted files next time so I don't think that I'll mention it

Just a thought... Did you try looking for a "lost drive" with the "restoration" utility that comes with ubcd4win?

Tom

Where can I find this utility. All I see is
programs->file management->recovery->restoration
but this asks for file names to rescue. If I type some name and click search it searches for a while and closes itself.

I didn't see restoration under disk tools.

PC inpector file recovery will allow you to scan the for lost partitions as will Test Disk.

I think handy file recovery will scan these sort of drives as well.

However you may have to shell out and buy HDD Regenerator which will fix bad sectors on the disk without losing the data. The problem you have I've sometimes been able to fix with several zero wipes of the disk but this is destructive and you'll lose the data.

I think testDisk is doing something. It found 2 partitions on the primary drive - a 30MB FAT16 that has DELL utilities and the remaining 28GB as a NTFS partition. I then used the "write" option to save partition table. When I restarted WinUBCD, It listed the FAT16 as drive symbol C: The D: is my other drive. Then it marked F: as unrecognized. I went back to testdisk and wrote partition table for that partition a couple of more times to no avail. still "unrecognized". This is the partition that is full (don't know how it got full). The other thing is it marked the FAT16 as "*" meaning primary and bootable and the NTFS as "P" meaning primary. Shouldn't the NTFS also be primary and bootable?

Active Partition Recovery

Try running this utility, I've used it before to recovery bad partitions, there's a free demo so you should get a good idea if you can recovery the data. The demo will list the file structure for you if it can recover it.

If the Winxp partition is booting off the fat primary then I'm sure the NTFS volume doesn't need to be primary (I might be wrong on this as I've not got time to check.)

Sorry, I typed "restoration" but was thinking of PC Inspector File "Recovery" as stidyup mentioned. Did this tool find any partitions?

From linux, are you able to copy your "locked" files to a fat32 partition?

Tom

nope for both. PC inspector file recovery finds folders with garbage in their name and content. I cannot touch protected folders in knoppix. It displays as "?--------" instead of the usual "drwxrwxrwx". I cloned this disk onto another perfectly working 40GB drive using clone maxx. this disk behaves exactly like the dying one. And in knoppix I am not seeing some of the folders I saw in original disk.

Can you put this hdd in another XP pc, you might be able to reset the folder permissions and give yourself access but you'll need to login on the admin account. NB not just a account with admin.

Did you try running the trial version of hdd regenerator?