Hi, On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 03:31:48PM +0000, Camaleón wrote: > On Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:54:49 -0500, Thomas H. George wrote: > > > Situation: My daughter works for a bank and must use Microsoft to work > > at home. Yesterday the system would not boot - no safe mode, no > > nothing, just return to loading bios. > > (...) > > > Is there any chance of recovering usable files before we wipe out her > > hard drive? > > I would try with plain copy/paste. > > If that also fails, put the disk into external USB case, attach it to > another windows xp (or later) box and perform there the common file > system diagnostic tasks (scan disk and defrag). But that is extremly dangerous...: you risk to loose/destroy informations on the damaged filesystem (nobody guarantees, that scandisk is not destroying data...). And especially defrag: this WILL destroy data, which are in lost files (=sectors of the harddisk which seem to be free according to the file system...). So, as Thierry already proposed: Make first a copy of the complete partition (using "dd" and ignoring the filesystem) and then work on the copy. And when you mount the "original" partition: do it ONLY with "read-only" flag -- in order not to destroy data!
Of course the question is: How important are the data, and how much time do you want to invest in order to recover them? Using "cp" or "rsync" you alread can copy some data... After that, you should first try to determine WHICH files you need -- and where the messages about incorrect inodes appear: for example, it is absolutely useless to try to recover the system-file e.g. in /windows/system32 -- you only have to worry about the data-files created by your daughter. Maybe those (at least some of them) can be copied without any problems? As "last resort" you can try tools like "scrounge-ntfs" -- this is a debian package to rescue data from damaged NTFS-Filesystems. But be careful: each time you write something on the filesystem (e.g.: also by using defrag or scandisc from windows) you risk to loose data and make recovery harder or even impossible, so: work on a copy of the disk!) Axel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20101128162217.gc5...@axel
