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- Aug 1, 2005
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I wanted to share a quick success story with everyone. I know that this deals more with Linux but I think this will help Windows users out there more than Linux users.
A laptop showed up at our helpdesk today from one of our territory sales managers that was having problems booting. A quick look revealed that the OS was having problems accessing or finding the NTOSKERNAL.DLL file. The OS would crash and not go any further. I ran a quick hardware diagnosis by pressing the CONTROL - ALT - D keys at the same time (This is used by Dell PCs to test the operational condition of HDD installed in Dell PCs). The revealed an error. So what I had now is a laptop with a bad HDD. This prompted a call to the user who was frantic about losing data that had not been backed up in the 2 years she had this laptop. I promised to do my best to recover her data and hung up the phone. I tried hooking the HDD to an External USB cable and then to my PC using a small adapter and I was able to run CHKDSK at he command prompt on my PC. It repaired many errors but I was still unable to read data on the drive. Things were looking very dismal at this point. Next I placed the HDD back in the laptop chassis and booted to a Knoppix CD I had burned the other day to play with. I was able to read the HDD using Knoppix. I was then able to move the data my Sales Manager needed to a small FTP server that I use on the network so that I can access files from anywhere in the building. If any of you are having problems reading data on a corrupt NTFS partitioned drive try recovering the data using Knoppix before you resign your self to lost data. It is free to download and try: http://www.knoppix.org/
A laptop showed up at our helpdesk today from one of our territory sales managers that was having problems booting. A quick look revealed that the OS was having problems accessing or finding the NTOSKERNAL.DLL file. The OS would crash and not go any further. I ran a quick hardware diagnosis by pressing the CONTROL - ALT - D keys at the same time (This is used by Dell PCs to test the operational condition of HDD installed in Dell PCs). The revealed an error. So what I had now is a laptop with a bad HDD. This prompted a call to the user who was frantic about losing data that had not been backed up in the 2 years she had this laptop. I promised to do my best to recover her data and hung up the phone. I tried hooking the HDD to an External USB cable and then to my PC using a small adapter and I was able to run CHKDSK at he command prompt on my PC. It repaired many errors but I was still unable to read data on the drive. Things were looking very dismal at this point. Next I placed the HDD back in the laptop chassis and booted to a Knoppix CD I had burned the other day to play with. I was able to read the HDD using Knoppix. I was then able to move the data my Sales Manager needed to a small FTP server that I use on the network so that I can access files from anywhere in the building. If any of you are having problems reading data on a corrupt NTFS partitioned drive try recovering the data using Knoppix before you resign your self to lost data. It is free to download and try: http://www.knoppix.org/
