DescentBB

As explained in the topic, \"Linux does not boot\", I have Linux on a PATA hard drive. I also have an SATA hard drive with a corrupt NTFS file system. The SATA hard drive is larger than the PATA hard drive, so I can not save an image of the hard drive. I used an expired trial version of VMware Workstation with the VMware player to create and run a temporary Windows XP machine that can directly access the SATA hard drive. Can anyone recommend good, free NTFS file recovery software? Thank you.

Data recovery software isn't that tall of an order normally, but free is a different story. How badly damaged is the file system? Is it beyond what the standard chkdsk can recover?

Chkdsk says, \"The type of the file system is RAW. CDKDSK is not available for RAW drives\". My Computer in Windows XP also displays the drive as being raw, but \"fdisk -l\" in Linux does say that the drive is NTFS.

I've successfully used the free \"TestDisk\" to fix a a busted partition table from a BartPE CD. Since I wasn't sure it would work I used \"GetDataBack for NTFS\" to copy all data over to another drive. This tools is worth it's money.

Sounds like your partition table got FUBAR'd, and the partition is listed as raw. You can try the ntfstools package that's available for most Linux flavors; that will happily ignore the partition type declared in the partition table and actually check if the volume is NTFS-formatted.

I just used TestDisk/Chkdsk, and the Windows recovery console to repair the file system, but once it's repaired, it somehow doesn't stay repaired. If I repair the boot sector and MBR either through TestDisk/Chkdsk or through the Windows recovery console, the file system is then accessible and all of the files are intact, but when I reboot the machine, the file system is listed as \"raw\" again. Does it matter that I'm doing this all through a virtual machine?

INTERRUPTION: I just figured out what might be causing the problem. There was a setting in VMware that caused changes to the hard disk to be discarded every time that the virtual machine shuts off... Ah-ha! It's on! I'll just turn it off and try again... I will reply again with the results.

Now Linux can mount the hard drive and the Windows virtual machine can tell that the hard drive is NTFS. I would prefer to repair the hard drive instead of copying the files, reformatting, and starting over, because I have software that requires activation, and I'm not sure if it can be reactivated. I believe that the Windows files are all intact, but I'm not sure how to get the partition to boot. I would appreciate help, but at this point Google will probably be enough. Thank you.

I was totally correct about everything! Thank you for the help. I do appreciate it. When I was trying to get GRUB to work a long time ago (see Linux does not Boot), I messed up the boot sector of the Windows hard drive. Apparently, you can not read NTFS drives unless there is a working boot sector. I opened up the XP virtual machine, turned on the view-system-files options, looked into the NTFS drive, and by golley, ntldr and boot.ini were both there! Anyhoo, I added Windows XP to the GRUB boot list, and I just booted into Windows XP with no data loss or reinstallation hassle whatsoever! I can now access all of the old data! Yay! I haven't been able to get to this data and stuff since I broke the hard drive a long time ago (see Linux does not boot). (If it was really important, I would have backed it up, but it's not, so I didn't)

Thank you. I'm just about done now. At this point, I just need to find a small, cheap flash drive, stick it into the back of the computer, and just leave it there for Windows and Linux to use as a file transfer medium.

Negatratoron wrote:I was totally correct about everything! Thank you for the help. I do appreciate it. When I was trying to get GRUB to work a long time ago (see Linux does not Boot), I messed up the boot sector of the Windows hard drive. Apparently, you can not read NTFS drives unless there is a working boot sector. I opened up the XP virtual machine, turned on the view-system-files options, looked into the NTFS drive, and by golley, ntldr and boot.ini were both there! Anyhoo, I added Windows XP to the GRUB boot list, and I just booted into Windows XP with no data loss or reinstallation hassle whatsoever! I can now access all of the old data! Yay! I haven't been able to get to this data and stuff since I broke the hard drive a long time ago (see Linux does not boot). (If it was really important, I would have backed it up, but it's not, so I didn't)

Thank you. I'm just about done now. At this point, I just need to find a small, cheap flash drive, stick it into the back of the computer, and just leave it there for Windows and Linux to use as a file transfer medium.

You theoretically can't do anything unless there's a valid MBR; the BIOS or the bootloader might complain about the lack of magic numbers (the two-byte sequence that says "BOOT FROM ME PLS!!!!111"). Once you've repaired the MBR, then you just have to pray whatever wiped it out didn't touch the partition table, which you should be able to restore in one of the methods you did. Good things to know for future reference (God knows I've done the exact same thing you did a hundred times).