Ubuntu
gnome-disk-utility package

Accessing data of internal drive

Asked by Zore Stis

Hi,
I'm normally using WIndows 7. SInce interrupting a system update i cannot boot my system from the hard drive ("missing operating system" appears as error message). To save my data before reinstalling WIndows 7 I made a live CD of Ubundu 12.04, because the "system repair" option was unable to fix the problem.
My internal Hard Drive appears at the "disk utility" having 3 volumes of who the first one includes the option to be mounted. Mounting this first volume creates a folder at "media" having files with weird symbol names and no endings. Checking the filesystem of the first volume gives me the message that the filesystem is not clean. The second and third ones do not include the option to be mounted or to check the filesystem. In addition the first one has as "partition type: uknown" and the 2nd and 3rd ones "partition type: HPFS/NTFS", also only the first one appears to have a "type" (FAT 16-Bit).
On GParted the HD appears to be "unallocated" and includes the warning: "Can't have a partition outside the disk", also all options in exception of 'new' and 'information' are not available (e.g 'check' is not available).
Unfortunatly my computer knowledge and the research in the internet did not help me further to access the data of my internal hard drive. Can you help me further with this informations to get the data from my disk?
Thanks a Lot in advance!
Zore

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Zore Stis (zore) said : 		#1

*I forgot to add that the second volume has as partition flag "Bootable" in the Disk Utility and also all three appear as "healthy" (SMART status) and without "bad sectors"

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Thomas Krüger (thkrueger) said : 		#2

It looks like your filesystem and/or the partition table have been damaged severely. The would explain the inability to boot the system. The HPFS/NTFS is proprietary and the Linux drivers are mostly based on reverse engineering. They lack some recovery features compared to Windows.
Your best option would be to try installing the HDD in a Windows PC as secondary drive and run some special recovery software. Also you should asked for help in a forum which is specialized on Windows since this is not a problem of Ubuntu Linux and the people there have much more experience with HPFS/NTFS failures.

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