Resetting partition table & recovering data with Knoppix?

[feenster99]

Hi,
My Uncle has a 250GB Maxtor IDE hard drive that has gone a bit duff. It was from a PikaOne USB enclosure thingy. He has it loaded up with data, but it has started to play up. We took the drive out of the enclosure and plugged it straight into the IDE port on a PC. The drive appears in the BIOS, but won't show up in Windows or any other bits of software. Norton Ghost gives the error "IDE controller error" when it is loaded.

I was recommended to try using Knoppix LiveCD to recover the data. However, I can't mount the USB drive in Knoppix, as I get the error "Partition table corrupt" or something similar (forgot to bring the bit of paper with the error written down home!).

Is it possible to rewrite the partition table from Knoppix so I can copy the data off? Are there any alternatives in Knoppix to ghost the disc? I know he should have done backups etc, but the data is important and I want to try everything (none destructive) to recover it.

Many thanks for your help...

Matt

 

[MarkB2k1]

I've had to do this before, with some success. I used the normal fdisk command to repartition the disks, as long as you keep the same cylinder boundaries as what the partitions were when you originally created them, it should not overwrite any data.....don't take it as gospell though!

 

[Vonhelmet]

I've had to do this before, with some success. I used the normal fdisk command to repartition the disks, as long as you keep the same cylinder boundaries as what the partitions were when you originally created them, it should not overwrite any data.....don't take it as gospell though!

It can be done, but the odds of remembering the boundaries correctly is pretty small.

 

[MarkB2k1]

of course