The HD in my Sony Vaio suddenly won't boot and all attempts to repair it have failed. All I care about at this point is recovering the data, so I tried to access it with Knoppix. After a "dirty drive" error message, I was able to view the contents. The problem is that it seems to only be recognizing the Sony recovery partition and not the Windows/Data partition. The drive size is detected at less than 10 gigs when it is actually 250GB.

I am completely green when it comes to Linux. How can I access the data partition so I can back it up to an external USB drive?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

When a drive is failing you *don't* want to access anything yet: just make the backup as fast and as flawless as you can. When you're finished *then* it's time to check things. Try 'ddrescue' instead of 'dd' (or 'dd_rescue' if you find you need to read back-to-front).

Ok, so I just started the process by typing "dd_rescue -A -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb" into the console.

It seems to be running but I have no idea if what I did was correct.

Ok, I finished the dd_rescue and it seemed to go well.

The problem is, now the backup drive is unmountable. Windows says it is not formatted and Knoppix says it cannot determine the filesystem.

What did I do wrong?

Thanks.

You copied the whole structure from one device to another, instead of copying it to a file. I suggest you keep the external drive data as backup and run 'testdisk' on the original. If enough information is there it should be able to search and find partitions. Make sure you use the /log setting and post contents if unsure.

I only have one external hard drive to use for backup, so if I am going to re-do the transfer, I want to first extract the data that I already backed up and keep it as a failsafe. How can I read the drive with Windows or Linux now that the filesystem seems to be screwed up?

Thanks.

Could you please try the 'testdisk' part?