Help me rescue my data using a Live CD
 

Hello

I have a Dell Laptop with WINXP Pro SP2 and I was attempting to resize a partition on it using Parition magic to install Linux when the power on my laptop ran out and it shut down. After the aborted partition attempt, I cannot now reboot into WINXP. I keep getting an error saying :

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll"

I burned a Knoppix Live CD in the hope that I would be able to access my windows paritions and rescue my data before having to reinstall WinXP again. But I cannot do that.

I can get Knoppix to load fine but when attempting to mount the windows partitions, I get the message:


"
Could Not Mount Device

WARNING: Dirty volume mount was forced by the 'force' mount option. fusermount: mountpoint is not empty
fusermount: if you are sure this is safe, use the non empty mount option

Failed to create FUSE mount point: No such file or directory

Retry to create FUSE mount point
FATAL: Module fuse not found

fusermount: mountpoint is not empty
fusermount: if you are sure this is safe, use the non empty mount option

Failed to create FUSE mount point: No such file or directory

Unmounting /dev/sda2 ()

"

Most of this is above my head but I desperately need to save my emails and a few other documents. How can I access them, if at all? Please help!

Not sure about Knoppix, but where are you trying to mount it to if it's a liveCD? Did you try the "non empty mount option", whatever that means?

How about this SystemRescue CD (I never used it, though)?

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

You could also do a Windows XP REPAIR INSTALLATION from the Windows XP boot cd. That only reinstalls the system files but retains registry and user settings. I would first, however, create an image of the hard drive in case things go berzerk.

How can I make an image of the hard drive? Is there an online guide that I can refer to?

One option is to type "testdisk" from a terminal in Knoppix as root, testdisk supposedly restores lost/damaged partitions. It should be easy to follow, if not, google to get some testdisk pointers. To make an image of the drive you will need a partition of the same or larger size of the Windows partition. If your partition is /dev/hda1 (first partition on ATA drive), and your recovery partition is on another ATA drive's first partition in the slave position, the dd command from a terminal as root from knoppix would be:

This will make a bit stream image with a 512k bite size of the same size of partition, but this may also be a problem if the partition size cannot be identified because of the re-size that was in progress may have left you without a partition. If the partition is 60GB, it would take a least an hour before the command prompt comes back signifying completion.
You may also want to try the command:

Which will bring up a companion to testdisk that recovers data, not sure if e-mails are one of the formats, but worth looking into without executing.

By making an image called "img.dd", you do not need the same size partition, the recovery partition can be bigger but must be formatted with any common file system. Then you can try a host of forensics tools to retrieve the data if you cannot get the original repaired.