Tag Archives: salvage

Laptop fails to boot. How can I salvage the hard drive?

Posted on July 11, 2012 | 5 Comments

Inspiron 1420 running Vista

Today, I started it up and it stopped at a black screen with only a cursor. After a couple tries it would also hang at the Windows boot animation. I ran the diagnostics (smartdrive IIRC) and it returns read errors.

So is the drive toast or can it be repaired?

If it’s toast, can I boot from a CD and get my data? For example put a Linux Live CD (Knoppix – http://www.knoppix.org ) in the optical drive.

ps weeping for my itunes
Would it be possible to just repair the OS or is this the sign of imminent failure anyways?

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Posted in Linux Live CDs

Tagged boot, drive, Hard Drive, inspiron, Laptop, salvage, vista

How do I set my partition table with testdisk to salvage data from a linux damaged partition?

Posted on March 7, 2012 | 2 Comments

I have (or better put, used to have) a dual boot setup of my laptop. The hard disk crashed and left me with some data to save, unfortunately the partition is inaccessible with many things I tried, including live cd’s (now I’m under Ubuntu live). I am using testdisk, and this is the table:

D HPFS – NTFS 0 1 1 9728 254 63 156296322
D FAT32 LBA 1803 1 1 4255 254 63 39407382 [NO NAME]
D Linux 4256 0 1 9543 254 63 84951720 [/]
D Linux 4256 1 1 5806 254 63 24916752
D Linux Swap 5807 1 1 5997 254 63 3068352
D Linux 5998 1 1 9728 254 63 59938452 [Linux_home]
D Linux Swap 9544 1 1 9728 254 63 2971962

My data is on the partition starting at 5998. Almost anything I try seems to be illegal. How can I resolve this mess?
Thanks…

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Posted in Linux Live CDs

Tagged boot, data, Disk, dual boot setup, hard disk, Laptop, Linux, many things, partition, partition table, salvage, setup, table, testdisk, Ubuntu

What is wrong with this hard drive?

Posted on July 30, 2010 | 8 Comments

My computer restarted the other night and afterwards I got a “DISK BOOT ERROR PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRES ENTER” message. I loaded up a linux live cd and I’m able to access the hard drive and salvage my data but I am not able to format the drive. When I attempt to format it doesn’t start, then gives me an error message.

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Posted in Linux Live CDs

Tagged boot, boot error, computer, Disk, disk boot, drive, error, error message, format, Hard Drive, INSERT, Linux, Linux Live CDs, message, night, please, salvage