Corrupt OS on HDD; Need to find files

[brachy33]

Hey people!

I have a used Raptor from a customer of mine that has a rather corrupt installation of WinXP Home on it. I was not able to repair the OS so it would boot (tried to fix MBR, etc).

I thought I could just plug the HDD into my machine running RHEL5 and be able to see the HDD and anything on it. Should this be so? My board's BIOS sees the drive just fine, but when I booted into Linux with the bad Raptor running, I can't see it under RHEL5.

Should I try and install, something like Knoppix, on the bad HDD and create another partition to work from? Again, I want to try to pull some old pictures off of the bad drive and I'm not concerned (at this point) with trying to repair the OS on the bad disk. Thanks!

[Ockie]

Did the corruption result from the bad drive?


You can always try data recovery tools, may have more sucess than mounting the drive to access files.

[brachy33]

The drive is still functional and spinning up just fine. I believe that this customer just loaded "something" on the drive and subsequently killed the OS. I was not able to boot into safe mode or repair the drives MBR to allow access to Windows.

In terms of data recovery tools, do you mean using something like this:

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=1&swid=53

I haven't tried that yet but I'm guessing that's a damn good place to go next. Thanks again!

[Old Hippie]

GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm) worked for me. Get the 15 day trial version and let it do its thing. To actually recover the files, you'll hafta pay for a license.

[cburwell]

Maybe try a live CD (Knoppix) of some sort? Have the Raptor as the only drive connected to the PC, and then boot to the live CD. I have used this a few times to pull files off of hard drives that were going bad. Knoppix will allow you to copy the files that you need to save to a network share or even a USB drive.