looking for a suitable hard drive now. Thanks for the advice, Daniel.
Bill ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of D R <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, November 2, 2014 11:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] help for a hypocrite Bill, The cloning of the drive would be a good safe measure. If possible, clone with the exact same type of hard drive and do a bit image backup. Then, on that cloned drive, I would use the latest version of EASUS Drive Partition Recovery. That would at least let you see data, info, etc., from that partition since it 'reads' that partition regardless what the current setting is. It sounds like the partition descriptors got hosed when it went into hibernate mode and Windows, and Linux sees it as a RAW Drive ready to be formatted. Else, if you had a disk hex editor you could just go and modify those hex descriptors for that partition. It would be tricky, but could be done. You would just need to know what those hex numbers are and replace them with what the drive says for the current state of that partition. Once changed, then try to boot up that cloned drive. It it comes up, great! Do a backup and of that partition and the system state and then reformat another drive, reinstall the OS, and then do a restore. Should be a days worth of work. If it doesn't, then use the EASUS Drive Partition Recovery to 'read' the suspect partition. The utility will need to store those files somewhere, so you had better have a large thumb drive or an external hard drive that works on USB 3.0 to put those files. And FYI, if you do use that utility, when it does a 'read' of that partition you don't have any way to tell it to skip certain files and directories. It does an 'all or nothing' approach. But, once the file is read and recovered, you can then tell the utility which files you want to move to a partition. Let us know how it goes On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 10:38 PM, Bill Humphries <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Ok, I haven't been fully practicing what I preach and haven't backup up a personal laptop in a while. It seems that my little girl was typing on it this weekend and my wife saw her and closed the lid...which should have made it hibernate. I go to open it tonight and it won't boot. I haven't noticed any bad hard drive sounds coming from it beforehand. This is a win 7 thinkpad. I yanked the harddrive and tried to mount it to another PC to look at data. In disk manager I could see the small system drive partition and the lenovo partition...the windows partition showed as RAW instead of readable. I then booted to ubuntu live CD and tried to see the data. In DISKS it shows that partition as unknown and doesn't present anything as available...but does show the other partitions as I would expect them to show in linux. Any ideas what has happened or best course of action? Should I try cloning the drive and working off of that? Thanks for any help/insight. Bill -- Daniel Rodriguez [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
