Linux to the rescue?

[sjt269]

Hi all,

So, I had a very, very lucky escape today; the day before a majorly important presentation, not much more than an hour after copying said presentation onto a pen drive, my laptop finally gave up and died on me. It's given me 4 years of faithful service, and right as I completed the last piece of work for the degree which I bought the laptop for, it finally let go. Very poetic.

Of course, I wasn't having any of that, so I've used Ubuntu on a pen drive to drag it kicking and screaming back to life. This is my first time using any form of Linux, and it's only thanks to a good friend of mine that I came across this solution. Naturally, I'm a little lost, but I'm learning as I go. I do, however, have one particular problem, and I fear the worst has happened.

I can't seem to find my Windows hard drive anywhere within Linux. Going to the 'Home' folder just shows something labelled 'OS' that seems to be the pen drive itself, no other drives show up. Now, that certainly seems to be a bad sign, and fits with the boot disk errors I'd been seeing. Does this mean that the hard drive is dead, or is there some witchcraft involved in finding a Windows drive from a Linux OS? I've also had a few errors about the OS failing to mount and something about NTFS and running chkdsk on Windows. It asks me to run chkdsk on Windows and then 'reboot into Windows twice', but the whole problem at the moment is that the laptop cannot successfully boot into Windows, so I'm not sure how to proceed.

This all seems to point to a dead hard drive. Can anyone out there offer me a ray of hope that I might be able to retrieve some data?

Thanks in advance,
Steven

STOP PRESS: Just before posting, I've found hope on another website that if Windows didn't shut down cleanly, this could be the reason for the 'failing to mount' messages and this might be why I can't get into it. Can anyone corroborate this or point me towards some good instructions on how to fix this?

:edit:

This is the error message that's periodically flashing up:

 

[PermaBanned]

Does the drive show up in gparted at all? As for data, even if the file system is corrupt then you might be able to recover some of it with PhotoRec...

 

[sjt269]

Aha, they do indeed show up in gparted:

I'm seeing some mentions on various forums about this 'dmraid' command that's appeared in my error message, and how turning it off can help Ubuntu detect Windows drives. A few posts even linked it to the existence of recovery partitions on the drives, and my laptop has a recovery partition, as shown in the image above. I've tried rebooting and looking for this option, but I can't for the life of me find it.

 

[sjt269]

After further reading, I'm coming round to the idea that turning off dmraid might enable me to get back into the Windows hard drive through Linux, but I can't find any clear guide as to how to turn it off. Maybe I'm grasping at straws, but I figure it's worth a shot and doesn't involve me having to tear the hard drive out of the laptop, which I can't do because I have no other PC at uni with me.

Could anyone give me some advice/instructions about how to turn off dmraid when I'm booting Ubuntu from a pen drive? There's an 'advanced options' choice that comes up when it boots (before loading Ubuntu proper) but there are no options visible when I go into the menu. Any F-- hotkeys that might work for this?

 

[sjt269]

Apologies for the triple post, but I've made a little progress.

I've now managed to make the 'DellUtility' partition visible in Ubuntu by playing with the boot settings (finally found where to type in the commands at the boot stage). That, combined with the fact that GParted can make the HDD spin up makes me think that maybe it's still alive and I need to kill this dmraid option to get back into it. So far I've tried 'nodmraid' and 'linux nodmraid' at the boot-up stage as suggested on other forums, but no luck. Anything I'm missing?

 

[melvis]

do you not have a windows recovery CD? if so you can boot to the recovery console and do chkdsk /f as the filesystem seems to need, then it should mount under linux

 

[sjt269]

I've not got a recovery CD with me at uni - can I (legally) get an .iso file and make one out of one of my blank CDs? I'll Google this myself, but if anyone can point me towards one faster than I can find it, I'd appreciate it.

:edit:

Found it, but looks like it's going to cost me 6GBP (I can't for the life of me find the pound symbol, all the symbols on my laptop keyboard have been moved around under Linux). Doesn't look like there are any free versions, so I might just have to stump up the cash. I'm going to keep checking for now though, just in case the site that charges for it is a scam, although it seems legit.

 

[drakioned]

All the symbols probably moved because your installation probably defaulted to US keyboard settings, there won't be a pound sign mapped to any obvious key.

 

[jack.mitchell]

You could also try to force mount your drive without running the necessary chkdisk. It is usually ok but is a last resort method if you cannot get windows to run a proper checkdisk.

1) First open a terminal.
2) Create a new directory bt typing

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows

3) force mount windows drive

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /mnt/windows -o force

If that doesn't work instead of ntfs, replace it with ntfs-3g, eg:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /mnt/windows -o force

Then open up your file manager and navigate to /mnt/windows!

 

[sjt269]

Thanks for the help guys, it turns out that running the Windows restore program has enabled me to mount the drive in Linux, and all my files seem to be present and accounted for. Still can't boot into Windows, but I can live off Linux until I get back home, then I can back up all the data and do a full format of the laptop. Shame my friend only set up Ubuntu in a very temporary way (i.e. doesn't save my settings when I shut down) but I can re-do the bootable pen drive next time I get near a working Windows machine. I've no spare ones, or else I might try doing it from within Linux to another pen drive.

I'm very relieved that everything is (so far) intact, I really thought the laptop had had it. And incidentally, it's so much more stable under Linux that I suspect all the recent problems I've been having with crashes etc may have been Windows issues rather than hardware issues, so maybe a format will fix them.

So, it looks like although I've had a few days of inconvenience, at the end of it all I may have discovered the cure to my laptop's 'hardware' problem is a fresh install of Windows, which saves me spending a few hundred pounds on a new laptop! Linux to the rescue indeed.

Thanks guys.

 

[masterluke]

..at the end of it all I may have discovered the cure to my laptop's 'hardware' problem is a fresh install of Linux

Corrected

 

[sjt269]

I knew someone would do that.

Actually, as of this morning, I've managed to completely (I hope) cure Windows and I'm talking to you now live from Vista, so all my programs etc are back in action, which is a relief. I've got a lot of music recording gear and plugins that would have been a pain to reinstall, plus I can now get my virtual guitar amp back, which I've been really missing.

If it's any consolation to the Linux fans, I'm actually really impressed by what Linux has to offer, and I've no doubt I'll be back to it at some point. I've been eyeing up the Raspberry Pi for a while, and now that I've seen how much Linux can do, I'm really tempted to buy one to play with. If only the wait for one wasn't so long!

 

[eXor]

..cure Windows ..Vista

I wonder if the Vista haters will let that one slide.