I appreciate the help on this in advance.

Our family laptop (read lots of important pictures) is blue screening on boot. It gets part way through the windows boot (why I think it's still alive) and throws an error about unable to mount boot partition or something like that.

I booted into Ubuntu live and cannot see the hard drive when I look in Nautilus. I do see the hard drive when I look in the disk utility. When I do sudo fdisk -l in terminal nothing comes up it just goes back to ubuntu@ubuntu:~$.

I feel like my hard drive is still alive, I just can't get to it via Ubuntu live. Any suggestions?

Hello,

Can you post the output of the following command?
I am asking this because most likely, you can try to force mount the drive and backup as needed from there. I just want to make sure that it is being detected enough to the point that you are able to mount it.

Cheers,

Josh

please do this in a terminal:
#become root user:
su -
#list available disks:
fdisk -l

if it sees your windows partition, then you could mount it (and do that "read only" please).

Otherwise, what I've done several times, is extract the disk, put it in a USB enclosure, then plug that into a working Windows or Linux PC. It usually succeeds mounting the disk

note that the argument for fdisk is a lowercase L

I'm with 16pide - if you don't have an enclosure to hand you could also move the h/d to a spare slot in a desk-top where the host system will treat it as a data drive and you can copy your stuff to another drive.

Thanks for the quick responses. I'm at work right now, but I'm going to try your suggestions tonight.

16pide

Are the commands you listed any different than "sudo fdisk -l" (lower case l)? If so, I've already tried that an nothing happens (it goes to the next line with "ubuntu@ubuntu:~$" -- waiting for me to enter another command.

corp769

I'll try your command tonight!

rrsc16954

I assume the physical connection for the laptop hard drive is much smaller than a regular "IDE" connection in a desktop, correct?

If push comes to shove, I'll try to find an external enclosure, I just feel like if the disk is good I should be able to tackle this with Linux. Right? I'm willing to develop my linux-fu.

Thanks again!

they should be just the same, but since your symptom (0 output) is what I get from a non root account, I suspect sudo is acting strange. su - should really log you as root. And then fdisk -l should give you some output.

Here are the results from: ls -al /dev/sd* /dev/hd*

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ls -al /dev/sd* /dev/hd*
ls: cannot access /dev/hd*: No such file or directory
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2011-05-19 21:11 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2011-05-19 21:11 /dev/sda1
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

16pide

I dig what you are saying. I tried what you suggested and it asks for password. I tried blank, ubuntu, nothing worked. Any ideas or did the above info get us further? I did find this in my searching for the su password: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Does the above output help corp769?

Looks like that's your hard drive, bro! Have you tried mounting it manually? I would try creating a new directory in /media, named anything you want, and mount your drive using the following:
Where hd1 is the new directory that you would create. If you get any warnings or errors, please paste them in here, using code tags. Thanks, and good luck dude once again

Cheers,

Josh

djkilgus,
I would not create a directory in /media. this directory, at least in my distribution is populated automatically when plugging a disk.
instead, create a directory in /mnt then do as corp769 just said.

Now what worries me is that you don't have Super User access on that machine. without this you can't debug what is happening, and you can't force Linux to behave as you want.

So if I were you, I'd first work on getting root access by finding the root password.

Searching on the Internet, it seems Ubuntu live cd like my fedora live cd does not have a root password. So I'm a confused with what's happening on your pc!

I am too man.... If only we had access

djkilgus - I must admit although I break up and rebuild desktops all the time I have never seen inside a laptop. However from the size and weight of a laptop and from 16pide's comment about putting it in a USB enclosure I assumed a laptop drive is the same as a desktop drive and that it would fit.

Sometimes if I am just trying to find out if a drive is useable or what's on it I will just sit it on a tin can beside the pc at the right height for connecting - if there are no available slots.

I am assuming the object is to get your data and not to have a learning experience in linux although don't get me wrong linux is a great tool for your situation - much more useful than the various windows boot/rescue disks. Have you tried knoppix? Quick to d/l and has some useful tools aboard for rescuing stuff from windows pc's. You do need to have somewhere to put your files though like a usb drive.

http://mnemonikk.org/2009/04/26/reco...fs-hard-drive/

The link above is to a personal blog (not mine - he's a techie in Berlin) with technical advice about recovering photos from a friend's drive using a tool called 'photorec' - I mention this because that and some other tools like it are on the knoppix distro. So knoppix gets you in and you use sudo to use the tools - if knoppix sees your drive - but worth a shot!

http://foremost.sourceforge.net/

That's a link to software now available to the public from the USAAF.

Good luck!

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