OS and everything gone!

[willin]

Ok guys this one has me stumped, I wanted to install a linux OS so I bought myself another hard drive (keep things seperate etc with no problems) after installing the drive I went to boot into windows XP (the old drive), nothing, it got to reconising the dvd drives at boot etc then stopped.
after trying several things I removed the new drive and tried to boot, nothing, so I took it to a local pc store and they said the old drive was blank nothing on it at all! I have tried the windows recovery console and various commands to fix the boot.ini, also with a NTLDR boot disk, all I get is "windows root>\system32\hal.dll is missing please reinstall this file".
Has anyone any advice?
Thanks in advance

 

[The Dentist]

At first when i read this i thought that linux had changed the MBR but then as you say they have checked the drive and is empty. could be that you have inadvertedly formatted the drive OR hopefully the file system has been changed to linux' own file system and the pc shop just put the HD in a USB caddy or plugged it into their machine. If you can plug it into a working machine and check the exact space of the HD and see if that corresponds with the supposed space it is meant to be.

example:

if u put it as slave on a working machine and check the drive and it says drive is empty and it has 70GB of free space when the drive is meant to be actually 120GB then you know that the remaining space is different file system and all your stuff is hidden in that file system. I would use a linux boot cd to see if there is anything in there. (well i'd try the boot cd first lol, saves putting it in another machine)

 

[pda]

yeah as above try and get hold of a linuxboot cd and see if there is anything on the drive. you sure you didn't format the wrong drive by accident?

 

[Purity]

Sounds like a possible hard drive issue - something has damaged the file allocation table of the drive?

 

[willin]

At first when i read this i thought that linux had changed the MBR but then as you say they have checked the drive and is empty. could be that you have inadvertedly formatted the drive OR hopefully the file system has been changed to linux' own file system and the pc shop just put the HD in a USB caddy or plugged it into their machine. If you can plug it into a working machine and check the exact space of the HD and see if that corresponds with the supposed space it is meant to be.

example:

if u put it as slave on a working machine and check the drive and it says drive is empty and it has 70GB of free space when the drive is meant to be actually 120GB then you know that the remaining space is different file system and all your stuff is hidden in that file system. I would use a linux boot cd to see if there is anything in there. (well i'd try the boot cd first lol, saves putting it in another machine)

Hi devil666x, May be I was a little bit vague with the original post, all I did was connect/ screw the new hard drive in the pc and boot up, nothing else! my intention was to create a dual boot system. may be there was a stataic elecricity surge from me while installing?could this cause this, anyhow thanks for the replys everyone.
btw, any way to retreive the files on the drive?

 

[beady]

As said before, try booting linux live cd. I recommend Backtrack but pretty much anything will do. Does the bios still detect the drive? If so, then I very much doubt it's damaged beyond repair.

From your original post, I'd wondered if you'd actually tried to install anything. It sounds very strange. I suppose static may have wiped out your drive, but i've never heard of it happening. I don't suppose you knocked the drive when installing the new one? In my experience, if you'd knocked it enough to kill it, you'd remember.

 

[willin]

Hi beady, the bios detects the drive, I use the boot menu to select which hard drive to boot into! I've installed XP etc on the new drive (that’s how I’m here) then re connected the old drive so no I didn’t format the wrong drive. In windows the device manager shows the drive with no problems, It’s a 250GB about half full when I go into the properties it shows 0 size 0 used, if I right click to open it says do you want to format.
It’s a ata drive, the only problem when fitting the drive was the existing ribbon cable was in the way slightly so it was a bit of a squash to slide it into position, the cable became scratched (not damaged as such) so at first when the drive would not boot I replaced it.
The linux boot I have ubuntu 7.10 I’ve tried to boot from this it says “busybox v1.1.3 initramfs", I also have freespire on CD It says "initramfs /bin/sh; cant access tty; job control turned off".
I have hardly had any experience with what I think are dos commands so ain’t got a clue.

Many thanks

 

[techquest]

Hi Willin

Try getting hold of Partition Magic 8 or something like that. Put it into a CD or DVD drive make sure that a CD or DVD drive is 1st choice boot in Bios and then boot the PC. PM8 will then tell you what you've got on what drives. It will also tell you if the drives have data or none.

By your initial statement I can't see that you could have erased the drive but one never knows. You might well have hidden a partion by mistake.

You could also use a FDISK from dos, W98 Startup floppy disk, and this would tell you how many partions on a disk and if any are set to active. To do this make sure that a floppy is also selected before your hard drive in boot in bios.

The trick in all of this is not to panic.

 

[beady]

It sounds like you've got install discs for linux, not a livecd. Download Backtrack 2 and burn it to a CD. Then try booting that. Log in with the username and password shown on the screen, and then type 'startx'. It'll put you into a desktop environment. I'll talk you through what to try when you get that far.

 

[wobbly]

first check that you have changed the jumpers to 1xmaster and 1xslave. If you have 2xmasters the PC will get confused (bless!)

All Linux distro CDs are bootable. So you can boot the machine and check any attached drives from the boot CD - Try the latest version of Ubuntu for testing.
It is unlikely that you have screwed your original drive, unless you have tried a format.

Your new drive may not be formatted out-of-the-box so it will need to be formatted in EXT3 for linux use.

I've done an earlier posting on here somewhere, that gives an overview of a dual boot machine, which gives the steps to get XP and Linux installed on a single machine - search through my postings, it was only recent.

 

[The Dentist]

Hi beady, the bios detects the drive, I use the boot menu to select which hard drive to boot into! I've installed XP etc on the new drive (that’s how I’m here) then re connected the old drive so no I didn’t format the wrong drive. In windows the device manager shows the drive with no problems, It’s a 250GB about half full when I go into the properties it shows 0 size 0 used, if I right click to open it says do you want to format.
It’s a ata drive, the only problem when fitting the drive was the existing ribbon cable was in the way slightly so it was a bit of a squash to slide it into position, the cable became scratched (not damaged as such) so at first when the drive would not boot I replaced it.
The linux boot I have ubuntu 7.10 I’ve tried to boot from this it says “busybox v1.1.3 initramfs", I also have freespire on CD It says "initramfs /bin/sh; cant access tty; job control turned off".
I have hardly had any experience with what I think are dos commands so ain’t got a clue.

Many thanks

does that mean when nothing is installed its half full? or when you installed xp again it shows half full?

if thats the case then it seems like the files are still there but the file system has changed.

 

[willin]

It sounds like you've got install discs for linux, not a livecd. Download Backtrack 2 and burn it to a CD. Then try booting that. Log in with the username and password shown on the screen, and then type 'startx'. It'll put you into a desktop environment. I'll talk you through what to try when you get that far.

Ok beady, im in as above after a very very long session trying.

 

[beady]

Alright, first of all you want to start up a konsole window (icon at the bottom left), and type:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. (that's a lowercase L in ls, not an uppercase i). This'll show what hard drives and partitions have been detected. Post the output, which will hopefully be something like:
sda
sda1
sda2
sdb
sdb1
sdb2
....

You're still 1 post short of being able to use pm's, so for now, we'll have to work here.

 

[willin]

Alright, first of all you want to start up a konsole window (icon at the bottom left), and type:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. (that's a lowercase L in ls, not an uppercase i). This'll show what hard drives and partitions have been detected. Post the output, which will hopefully be something like:
sda
sda1
sda2
sdb
sdb1
sdb2
....

You're still 1 post short of being able to use pm's, so for now, we'll have to work here.

It says
/dev/hda /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdc /dev/hdd /dev/sda /dev/sda1

 

[beady]

Okay, so that means you've got 1 IDE drive (hda) with 2 partitions, an IDE cdrom (hdc) and a SATA drive (sda) with only one partition. I'm guessing that the IDE drive is the old, broken one, and the SATA drive is the new one, so we want to see what happens if we try to mount and read the hda partitions.

Type:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

Hopefully this will succeed. If it doesn't, post the errors you get. If it does, it means that the partition is intact and we can try the next one.
now do:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. Gonna see if you can use PM's now.

 

[willin]

Okay, so that means you've got 1 IDE drive (hda) with 2 partitions, an IDE cdrom (hdc) and a SATA drive (sda) with only one partition. I'm guessing that the IDE drive is the old, broken one, and the SATA drive is the new one, so we want to see what happens if we try to mount and read the hda partitions.

Type:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

Hopefully this will succeed. If it doesn't, post the errors you get. If it does, it means that the partition is intact and we can try the next one.
now do:

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. Gonna see if you can use PM's now.

bt ~ # mkdir /mnt/testdir
mkdir: cannot create directory `/mnt/testdir': File exists
bt ~ # mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/testdir
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
bt ~ # ls /mnt/testdir
bt ~ #

 

[beady]

Hmm, what about hda2? This means that the partition type isn't being detected automatically. You could try

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. Does that work?
Can you access email from within backtrack? Probably webmail. If you forwarded port 22 (in the router setup) to your PC and emailed me your i.p. address I could log in and walk you through this. It's going be difficult doing it posting here. Use my hotmail address from 'Send a message via msn' below my avatar.

 

[willin]

Hmm, what about hda2? This means that the partition type isn't being detected automatically. You could try

You don't have permission to view the code content. Log in or register now.

. Does that work?
Can you access email from within backtrack? Probably webmail. If you forwarded port 22 (in the router setup) to your PC and emailed me your i.p. address I could log in and walk you through this. It's going be difficult doing it posting here. Use my hotmail address from 'Send a message via msn' below my avatar.

bt ~ # mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/testdir
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument
Failed to mount '/dev/hda1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/hda1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?

beady mate, ive been at my pc for hours and hours now and i am literally cream crackerd! sorry, and thanks for your help, hope you dont mind if i leave it for now.
many thanks M8.

 

[beady]

Fair enough. At least you're detecting partitions on the drives, but as yet we don't know what's happened to them. As for why the last mount command ailed, unsure at the moment. The error message is just generic and doesn;t give any info. It could be the partition was formatted FAT32, but usually these will mount without specifying a filesystem type, which is why we tried ntfs.

You'll probably need to use something like TestDisk to fix the disk. You can get it on Windows, but I've never tried it there, and it's not too easy to use. Give it a go if you like. Maybe someone else can recommend other software to fix the drive?

Maybe try again tomorrow.

 

[willin]

Hi beady, your assesment is spot on only the IDE drive the old broken one it had one partition, I've downloaded TestDisk the tests so far (thay take forever) have all said there is no physical problems with the drive, I cant access email from within backtrack, cant find webmail at all.

Thanks.