File recovery by Linux question

[Edward Yee]

Somehow I had a SATA hard drive (500 GB, Western Digital) suffer a catastrophic failure where first programs simply would not open other than AIM, Paint, Explorer, something else and Registry Editor, then after I moved a bunch of files to a second partition, the drive itself seemed to fail so bad that it would no longer load -- from the Windows XP installer, the drive read as maybe 131 GB of unpartitioned space or a single partition. Don't care for the OS or programs, just want to recover files.

Now it's plugged into another desktop (the "native" hard drive is also SATA) and I'm using the latest build (minime) of PCLinuxOS with the KDE Desktop, but while I can reach the USB external hard drive just fine, I can't figure out how to access either of the two SATA "internal" hard drives, at least not from root, and I don't have a SATA enclosure. Any advice on how to proceed?

[Marcus Aurelius]

Somehow I had a SATA hard drive (500 GB, Western Digital) suffer a catastrophic failure where first programs simply would not open other than AIM, Paint, Explorer, something else and Registry Editor, then after I moved a bunch of files to a second partition, the drive itself seemed to fail so bad that it would no longer load -- from the Windows XP installer, the drive read as maybe 131 GB of unpartitioned space or a single partition. Don't care for the OS or programs, just want to recover files.

Now it's plugged into another desktop (the "native" hard drive is also SATA) and I'm using the latest build (minime) of PCLinuxOS with the KDE Desktop, but while I can reach the USB external hard drive just fine, I can't figure out how to access either of the two SATA "internal" hard drives, at least not from root, and I don't have a SATA enclosure. Any advice on how to proceed?

Open a terminal window and tell us what "mount" says. It might be that the Linux you are using does not mount internal drive NTFS partitions by default, but the output of that command should tell us what filesystems are mounted (and where) and what not. Theoretically mounted filesystems on non-removable media such as internal hard disk should appear in /mnt
but there is no standard on how the subdirectories, if used, are named.

[Agent Sorchus]

The 131 Gb size is due not to the drive dieing but that is all xp normally assumes, however their is a special part that is used to make the drive work at it's full size. I would be willing to bet that the xp installer cannot utilize this part and is giving you the wrong size.

In other words the size reported is not a symptom of the drive failing, but an artifact of xp.

(I have a 160gb in an older computer that only reports as 131070MB and at one point investigated why.)

[Ace Pace]

For the 131GB, upgrade your windows XP installation to Sp2/3 (obviously, 3). Windows XP SP0 does not support full size NTFS partitions.

[Edward Yee]

Running the Linux build from the afflicted PC with that SATA hard drive, chose the Application Launcher Menu (Start button equivalent), ran the "mount" command in a terminal window, got this:

/dev/root on / type rootfs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/My Book type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=500,utf8,shortname=mixed,flush)

The "My Book" reference is to the USB external I've got plugged in as the destination for any recovered files.

[Edward Yee]

Ghetto edit: Tried the SP2 installer, got this from the partition select screen: The onboard SATA hard drive size total was listed as 476940 MB, with only 1 partition of "Unknown" file system at 131072 MB, and the rest of the drive was treated by the installer as "unpartitioned," 345868 MB.

I'm aware that Knoppix is supposed to be a good choice for LiveCD if doing data recovery, but I don't have any SATA 3.5" HDD enclosure, so any further advice would be appreciated.