Computer crashed, but the hard drive is still good.

joewal · 07-06-2009, 11:38 AM

Hi,

I have a hard drive from an older computer that quit working(not recoverable). The hard drive is still good. I don't know how old the version of Linux was. I need to get some files off the hard drive. What is the best solution to do this?

Thanks in advance, Joe

Uncle_Theodore · 07-06-2009, 11:43 AM

Connect it to another Linux machine, use
fdisk -l
to see what partitions the drive has, then mount partitions and recover the files.

joewal · 07-06-2009, 11:48 AM

Thanks for the quick reply. we don't have any machines with Linux at this location. Which version of Linux should I load on a machine? I am a very novice user to Linux.
Thanks,

Uncle_Theodore · 07-06-2009, 11:56 AM

You can do that with a live-CD (knoppix or such), a USB stick or even with Windows, provided the filesystem on your drive is ext2 or ext3. There's a program called explore2fs for Windows. http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs

If you want to install Linux on one of your machines, it doesn't really matter what distro you use for such an operation.

joewal · 07-06-2009, 01:49 PM

I installed Ubuntu and now I can see the files. I get a message that says, The folder contents could not be displayed. You do not have the premissions necessary to view the contents of (the folder)