logical partition in XP unaccesable. fixing with linux?

ufmale · 08-13-2008, 05:27 PM

I have a XP on my computer partition as c: ,d:, and e:
For some reason, the d: drive is not accesable anymore.

In XP, it shows the disk, but if I try to access the drive, it will ask if I want to format it.

So I boot the machine with linux, I can see the disk, but still cannot access it.

Using parted to print the partition table, I got,

Number start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 26.6GB 26.6GB primary ntfs boot
2 26.6GB 100GB 73.4GB extended lba
5 26.6GB 42.4GB 15.7GB logical
6 42.4GB 100GB 57.7GB logical ntfs

I am able to mount /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda6, but not the /dev/sda5.
Still trying to search on the Internet how to fix this.
Can someone help guide me please?

mostlyharmless · 08-13-2008, 05:38 PM

You might want to try and mount it under linux (read-only to be safe) to see if that works. If nothing else, you'll be able to get at your files. There are a number of Windows based disk repair 3rd party utilities of course, not sure whether using linux based tools on ntfs partitions is entirely advisable at this point. If it were fat32 you could certainly try fsck after mounting it. You could try scandisk from the Windows recovery console if it doesn't work from the control panel(Properties/Tools/Error checking ..)

ufmale · 08-13-2008, 05:42 PM

Right now, I cannot mount it on linux. The filesystem is ntfs, but as you can see from the parted print, it does not even show the filesystem of sda5

mostlyharmless · 08-13-2008, 05:56 PM

Right, umm, I guess you mentioned that, didn't you? Sorry. I presume mount complains about the superblock or filesystem. I'd still recommend Windows based tools to work on an ntfs file system. If scandisk doesn't work you could try http://www.diskinternals.com/; haven't used them but they're relatively well known...