hi..

one of my buddy has got some problem in his hard-drive (ide).
he is running fedora 8 + windows
the grub menu is coming up fine, but windows is not bootable anymore.
the good thing: linux is still bootable

the problem: he has got a lot of critical data (which needs to be recovered) in 2 ntfs partitions.
he is unable to mount the ntfs partitions (even thru ntfs-3g)

mount error:
unable to mount the requested device.
try running chkdsk by booting into windows or try --force option

--force is not giving any +ve results either.

does this mean that the ntfs partitions are corrupted, as there is 1 fat32 partition which is perfectly mountable.
is there any utility like dosfsck that can scan the ntfs partitions from fedora..?

Sounds like it could be filesystem corruption, or it could be some kind of localized hard disk damage.

I've never worked with ntfs, so I can't recommend anything specific, but if you have the space available, I do recommend first trying to use ddrescue to make an image copy of the partition and work off that instead of the original. You could end up making the problem even worse if you mess with it too much without knowing what you're doing. It should also make it clear whether there's any physical damage to the disk.

Do not force mount a dirty ntfs partition. You need to have windows to correct itself. I once force mounted a vista partition under ntfs-3g and trashed the partition. Data still present but would not boot. Spent 3 hours working out some of the file table corruptions but finally figured I could restore my 1 week old backup faster than what it would take to fix it.

Brian

Hey There,

Look into Linux Defender (It's Knoppix with ntfs support). I've used it to fix problems with Windows SYSTEM file, etc and not had any issues (of course, the machine I was fixing was a piece of garbage to begine with

Best wishes,

Mike

i guess, i have to try making the problematic HD as a slave in some other system.. atleast the data would be safe.
then, i'll give a try to ddrescue or linux-defender.

thanx for the suggestions guys!