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Re: [LUG] OT: Recover files from a xp/vista down/upgrade

 

Richard Brown wrote:
Hi Guys

Thanks for all the help with the network issue. Sorry I haven't got
back to folks yet, I have only just got over a rather heavy cold.

In the meantime, I need to try to recover files from a xp/vista
down/upgrade that went wrong. I'm told the files are still there just
not viewable and that a Linux distro will be able to recover them
quite easily. So which distro and where do I download it from please?

Thanks.
You could try the Ubuntu Live Desktop CD. It should *hopefully* detect the drive and allow you to mount it to recover the files.

If it doesn't mount it then you may have to use ntfsfix (can't remember if its on the live CD, you may need to install it). If it isn't installed, from a terminal window on the live CD run the following:

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Then from a terminal window, run ntfsfix. You'll need to know the partition (i.e. sda1, sda2 etc). You can find this out by running fdisk -l. Here's the output from my laptop...

rob@laptop:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7f33fd84

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        7650    61440000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            7651       10081    19527007+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3           10082       30323   162593865   83  Linux
/dev/sda4           30324       30401      626535   82  Linux swap / Solaris


As you can see, /dev/sda1 is NTFS formatted.

So if I was to fix this partition I would run...

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda1

This would any errors on the partition and then allow me to mount it (either from the desktop or from a terminal window).

Anyway, hope this helps.

Rob


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