Evening Folks,

My laptop, running Win2K, died due to a disk crash. I want to salvage whatever I can, so I booted with a Kanotix live cd but I am unable to mount any of my 3 drives and fsck doesn't work either.

Can anybody tell me what I can use to try and recover data from the dead drives or whether there is something that I can use to try and recover them with?

Thanks
Joe

Try Knoppix. If that does not work, I guess you'll have to get proffesional help or dump it.

If it is a logical error and not physical, check out R-Studio from http://www.r-tt.com/

It saved my butt one time - we'd just spent a while merging code for a big project, hadn't checked the code in and Window$ crashed, took out the MBR so Windows could not see it, nor could Linux-based rescue CDs.

I tried Stellar Phoenix (it's CRAP and does NOT work as advertised. They advertise full NTFS 5.1 feature set support but we bought it only to find it does NOT work with NTFS compression. They refused to refund our money so we had to resort to disputing it with AmEx. Enjoy the chargeback, Stellar!), which failed miserably. Tried several others, none worked.

We came across the R-Tools web site. By that time I was skeptical, but we tried the R-Studio demo, and it recovered 99% of our code (all files <64KB) and the rest I recovered using some of the other features in the demo and stiching them together. We went ahead and bought it anyhow even though the demo helped us recover ALL files from the project because it saved our behinds!

I can't speak for NTFS recovery tools, but at the risk of stating the obvious, this is a prime opportunity to call attention to the importance of making regular backups. I realize this may be somewhat OT from the original question, and I realize this isn't helpful to the current situation, but there's really no reason why a hard drive failure should cause serious pain. Backups are the one thing that everyone agrees should be done, but for whatever reason, often aren't. I'd encourage everyone to establish a schedule for making backups of your important data, if you do not have one in place now. Best of luck with the data recovery. -- J.W.

Moving to General.

The question really has more to do with Windows than with Linux, as the recovery tools will likely exist in a windows environment.

Good Luck!

Cool