Hard Disk Data Corrupted - Please Help

[Draco]

Hi All,
Here is my situation. I dual-boot Windows XP and Sabayon linux on my machine. I was in windows earlier tonight and got a BSOD. Nothing new. When I restarted neither OS will load, even though grub is working fine. When I boot from a live dvd I can mount the linux partition just fine, but when I try to mount the windows partition I receive the following error:

mount: No such file or directory

Does anyone know what the problem is, and if there are any solutions I can try before sending off my hard drive to a professional data recovery service? I really can't afford to lose my data.
Thanks to everyone that read all of this,
Draco

[brewbuck]

What exact command are you using when you try to mount the Windows partition? And what kind of partition is it? FAT32 or NTFS?

[Draco]

Brewbuck,
The problem does not lie in the fact that my partition is NTFS. I know the special mount commands needed, and I can even mount my NTFS formatted external drive off the livecd environment.

[Elysia]

Why not try to use some partition tool? They'll usually tell if the partition/HD is damaged in some way.

[matsp]

Have you tried booting from a Windows DVD/CD - I wouldn't be surprised if the Windows checkdisk application is better at recovering your hard-disk than Linux. Even tho' linux has been able to read NTFS for quite some time, it's still a reverse-engineered product, and there's probably a more robust implementation in Windows - particularly when it comes to "figuring out what's wrong when something gone wrong" type things.

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Mats

[yancy]

Hi Draco, try a partition recovery tool. Since the problem is with your NTFS partition I suggest you to try NTFS data recovery software. I had success recovering my accidentally formatted partition using this utility. You can use the demo version to see whether the software is able to recover your files or not, if you can see the data you are looking for, then you can go for it. I understand how it feels when you lose your important data. Try this out, See if it helps you recover your lost data.

[matsp]

Considering the original post was almost two weeks back, I suspect the original poster has either solved the problem or got on to solving the problem by recreating the data on a new disk [and hopefully using better backup technique!].

Look at the date of posts before replying.

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Mats

[maxorator]

The best software you could get: SpinRite

Programmed fully in assembly, has a very reasonable price. Has a high amount of good feedback.

[Elysia]

Just because something is written in full assembly doesn't make it better.
In my book, that makes it worse since it's prone to bugs, errors, mistakes and non-portable.

[maxorator]

Just because something is written in full assembly doesn't make it better.
In my book, that makes it worse since it's prone to bugs, errors, mistakes and non-portable.

Assembly & amateurs = UNSTABLE, assembly & professionals = ULTRAPOWER

Plus assembly is EXACTLY the right thing when dealing directly with hardware, specially hardware corruption AND for programs that work as an OS like this one. That guy has put years of work into that program just to make everyone able to restore their harddrives quickly and reliably.

I don't think portability is an issue, because some people just don't write code that compiles for both x86 and pocket calculators...

Btw this is a clash between communities. There are a lot of assembly programmers out there who would be quite offended by the saying that assembly in general is unstable. And I think C++ programmers don't agree with the idea of C++ being damn slow. So I think I know which side of arguments to expect from a C++ community like this...

[Elysia]

OK, so let me just add two things:
1) Assembly isn't unstable - it's just very difficult to program in and you can produce lots of bugs and general crashing while it's not intended. Assembly takes longer to develop and is harder to develop and thus more prone to errors and mistakes (which is also why I don't fully trust software written in assembly).
2) Optimized assembly is faster than C/C++. It has been shown, for example, in emulators where speed is critical. However, I don't necessarily believe C/C++ is slow either. It's perfectly fine to write a program in C/C++ that has equaling speed to that of assembly. It depends on the use, really.

Both have their ups & downs.
Oh and generally, I don't see GUI being associated with assembly and I'm a big fan of pretty, nice GUIs. I don't like powerful applications that have poor GUI, lots of functions & clutter around with absolutely no descriptions. I can't stand them.
But then again, all assembly projects doesn't necessarily need to be like that.

[maxorator]

Being more error prone is a matter of person. People dedicated to assembly programming handle their job very well. Let's just rephrase this statement: assembly is not very beginner-friendly.

Well, I remember testing an MD5 algo, in which the C++ implementation managed to calculate and compare 110000 hashes/sec, C implementation 600000, assembly about 2 million times on my machine.

I generally don't care about GUI. I have Windows XP with everything possible turned off. I don't like Vista's "fancy" look because the words "microsoft" and "graphics" instantly activates the "using too much processor power and memory" section of my brain and I can't stand it. Every time I look on the screen I think of it. That's why I can never work with Windows Vista.

[Elysia]

Being more error prone is a matter of person. People dedicated to assembly programming handle their job very well. Let's just rephrase this statement: assembly is not very beginner-friendly.

I know it's not very beginner friendly, but even so, writing good assembly code takes lots and lots of time and it's complicated, requires good knowledge, and is very error prone. Not to mention doing easy things and using language functions such as classes is impossible in assembly. Languages like C++ were built for a reason, after all.

Well, I remember testing an MD5 algo, in which the C++ implementation managed to calculate and compare 110000 hashes/sec, C implementation 600000, assembly about 2 million times on my machine.

As I mentioned, assembly can be faster than C/C++, but it also depends on how you implement your code and optimizations

I generally don't care about GUI. I have Windows XP with everything possible turned off. I don't like Vista's "fancy" look because the words "microsoft" and "graphics" instantly activates the "using too much processor power and memory" section of my brain and I can't stand it. Every time I look on the screen I think of it. That's why I can never work with Windows Vista.

Wow. Poor you. I'd love to be using Vista if it weren't such a sad piece of software right now, so buggy, so crash-prone, etc, etc.

[maxorator]

Classes are just a different interface to exactly the same thing. You only need to know HOW to do it in assembly.

It certainly is faster, the question just is, is it worth the time (and money)?

[Elysia]

Classes are just a different interface to exactly the same thing. You only need to know HOW to do it in assembly.

Yes, it is. But then again, it simplifies things, doesn't it?

It certainly is faster, the question just is, is it worth the time (and money)?

Indeed. That's the question, isn't it?