Ubuntu Live CD recovered Windows files

Hi,

I just wanted to post this experience and hopefully this is an appropriate place to do it. Recently my nephew could no longer boot into his pc which came loaded with XP when he purchased it about 5 yrs ago. The problem was he kept getting a message during the bootup that certain files were corrupted and that he could attempt to try to repair them using the XP install CD. We tried that and got to a prompt where we ran chkdsk with repair parameters but the result was a message that certain parts of the hard drive were unrecoverable and so we still couldn't boot into XP. We tried several other things like safe mode and repeated some attempts but we slowly realized it was time for a new hard drive. His 80 gb hard drive was about 5 yrs old and from what he told me, he had also been having some previous troubles where he had to hold the power button to shut things down and it had been running slow, etc.

After changing our plans from trying to fix his hd to trying to recover his files, we decided to try to use the Ubuntu Live CD to see if we could recover his files that way. We would boot from the Live CD and not install but just let it run in RAM in an attempt to see if it would have access to the drive and the XP folders. I've been using Ubuntu for about a year now (dual boot w/XP) although I still consider myself a noob. I'd read about this idea before and even found a link (don't have it available right now) which included some commands to try to force the mounting of the drive in case the drive was not visible in Ubuntu right away.

We were both ecstatic when this worked perfectly and the Ubuntu Live CD saw the Windows folders and all it's contents. We hooked up his external drive and copied the whole windows profiles without any problems. So although this is probably obvious and old news to this forum, I thought I would share this in case anyone runs into a similar problem. There are some other "dead" hard drives that I'd given up trying to recover their contents but now I may revisit them in the near future. It's possible this won't work on those hd's but it's worth a shot.

 

Yeah, this is why I always pack a live cd in my laptop case.

 

Yesterday was the first time I used Ubuntu Live CD in this manner on my Vista x64 box. I created a dynamic disk and it failed on me. I had 600+GB worth of data on it. Vista wasn't able to fix it and the first thing I thought of instead of googling for a fix was to use the Live CD. The Live CD was able to see my dynamic disk and was able to move the files to another drive.

Never knew a Live CD could be this useful.

 

I'll pack one too from here on out.

Now my nephew has a new WD 320 gb hard drive on his 5yr old P4 Dell. I've re-installed XP and the latest Ubuntu and now that's he seen Ubuntu save his files, I'm sure he'll use it along with XP.

 

This is obviously the advantage of devoting a small portion of your HD to Linux and dual-booting. If you can't boot into windows, at least you can boot into Linux, access your files and get to work.

 

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/
If you're tech savy, you can make a windows vista live cd out of your own windows vista 64bit. The tools you need is already in Vista Sp1 beta, but it was removed in the official sp1.

"Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows Vista DVD's "recovery center," as we've come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows Vista, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it's damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows' users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own."

If you want to go with the easy route, just download the disk. It's supposed to be legal if you have a legal copy of Vista.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

 

QFT. It's super handy.

 

thanks, i will take a look at it.