My hard disk went nuts on me last saturday. Windows wouldnt boot, my files couldnt be recovered with Symantec Ghost, and it seemed like the disk was completely dead. I booted up my PC using a bootable Linux disk (Knoppix 3.4) and it somehow reads my HDD. The HDD runs REALLY slow but still works for some reason in linux. The problem is it says that I dont have enough permissions to view the files. Is there any way to get around this? If anybody can tell me how to get at the files so I can back them up I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.



-nighthawk15

What version of Windows? If it's an XP drive or 2000 with NTFS filesystem, you can only read, but not write. This can be good however, because if you get another drive to install onto, you can always use Knoppix to copy files to the new drive (if it's vfat instead of NTFS). I had the same issue about a year ago, but by the time I got a new drive ready, the old one started making a really loud grinding sound... I took it apart and started using it as an example to people that have me work on their computers. No big loss, but would have liked to get my text documents off first.

Thanks for the quick reply. The drive is formatted for xp and yes I am getting a new drive. I have two Seagate Barracudas (7200RPM SATA) on the way and they will probably be here tomorrow or wednesday. Last time I had a drive die on me I just let it go but this time I have a lot more stuff that I really dont want to lose. Thanks a lot for the info.

I'm no expert on this, but Knoppix should give you ownership of files on any hard drive on the system - and by "you" I mean either user knoppix or the root user. I have not had to deal with rescuing NTFS drives, so I'm not sure what the deal with file ownership is, but if the worst comes to the worst you could always do a "chown -R knoppix /mnt/hda1" or whichever hard drive you're mounting (perhaps followed by a "chmod -R u+r /mnt/hda1") to explicitly give yourself permission to view all the files on the drive.

I recently helped out a friend with a non-booting Windows machine by starting the Samba server from the KDE menu (I was using Knoppix 3.7, I'm not sure if it's this easy on other versions) and then using another Windows machine connected through his router to download files from the bad HDD. He was astounded by the power and majesty of Linux in general and Knoppix in particular - and this is a bloke who works in IT!

R.

also use ubunto live linux it is good

just type "su", type root's password and you have maximum permissions

ok here's what u got to do
first of all if u can get a newer version of knoppix that could be a plus, either way never mind!

try this ... just enter in level 3 (only console) like this:
knoppix 3 at the first boot screen

so verify that u r root, or, simply type su at the console screen
mount the file systems like this

mount -t auto /dev/hd(a,b,c,d,) /mnt/hd(a,b,c,d)

then u r gonna need a fat 32 partition to be able to write in...

or try using samba if u don't have or can't get a fat32 partition in some other disk!!!

cheers!

Sorry nighthawk, I don't really have an answer to your question.

But, I know that modern PC bios' as well as some hard drives have support for S.M.A.R.T. Was that enabled?

If it was, shouldn't that have warned you before the hd failure?

I really hope you already have got your files back... But if you still need some help, here goes my 2cents :

There is a program called partimage that can backup (like Ghost does) the entire NTFS partition this way you can restore it on another drive.

Or you can go on http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ download the kernel module and read your files from NTFS.