Hello everyone.
Several days ago I was cleaning up my wife's computer (IBM Thinkpad T43 laptop, Windows XP SP3), including uninstalling several programs she no longer uses. I uninstalled Norton Ghost. When the computer rebooted after the uninstall, I was greeted with a BSOD during boot. Attempting to boot into safe mode or into the Recovery Console produced the same result.
I then used UBCD Windows to boot up. This showed me that the hard disk was not being recognized and would not mount. Next, I used the Ultimate Rescue CD and booted into Live Linux. Once again, the various file managers again did not show the existence of the hard disk.
Next, I ran TestDisk from the Live CD. TestDisk showed the hard disk and said the partition table was missing or corrupted. It also said the backup MFT was missing or corrupted. Running through the repair sequence didn't work. After all that, the disk was still not being recognized and wouldn't mount. I was also getting messages about geometry errors. Changing the geometry from 255 to 240 as recommended still didn't fix the problem. I did get to the point, though, where TestDisk was showing all of my files and folders using the list command.
I also tried mounting it through the terminal using mount /dev/sda1 but got an error every time.
Finally, I mounted an external USB hard disk and tried copying individual files and folders using TestDisk. Though the files showed up using list, copying either failed completely, or I got the correct files name copied to the external drive, but all the files were empty.
I fear that by now, with all the messing around I've done with TestDisk, the drive and it's contents are hopelessly lost. I had been doing backups, so there are only a handful of files on there that I really care about that have changed since my last backup.
Any ideas to salvage either the entire drive or just retrieve some files would be greatly appreciated.
Several days ago I was cleaning up my wife's computer (IBM Thinkpad T43 laptop, Windows XP SP3), including uninstalling several programs she no longer uses. I uninstalled Norton Ghost. When the computer rebooted after the uninstall, I was greeted with a BSOD during boot. Attempting to boot into safe mode or into the Recovery Console produced the same result.
I then used UBCD Windows to boot up. This showed me that the hard disk was not being recognized and would not mount. Next, I used the Ultimate Rescue CD and booted into Live Linux. Once again, the various file managers again did not show the existence of the hard disk.
Next, I ran TestDisk from the Live CD. TestDisk showed the hard disk and said the partition table was missing or corrupted. It also said the backup MFT was missing or corrupted. Running through the repair sequence didn't work. After all that, the disk was still not being recognized and wouldn't mount. I was also getting messages about geometry errors. Changing the geometry from 255 to 240 as recommended still didn't fix the problem. I did get to the point, though, where TestDisk was showing all of my files and folders using the list command.
I also tried mounting it through the terminal using mount /dev/sda1 but got an error every time.
Finally, I mounted an external USB hard disk and tried copying individual files and folders using TestDisk. Though the files showed up using list, copying either failed completely, or I got the correct files name copied to the external drive, but all the files were empty.
I fear that by now, with all the messing around I've done with TestDisk, the drive and it's contents are hopelessly lost. I had been doing backups, so there are only a handful of files on there that I really care about that have changed since my last backup.
Any ideas to salvage either the entire drive or just retrieve some files would be greatly appreciated.