Emergency! Recovering NTFS partitions w/ Linux!


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Hi!

I need some major help.... here's the problem:

I have one physical drive that was separated into two logical partitions... was running Windows XP. I tried to merge the partitions earlier using Partition Magic but the merge failed, and now I'm left with corrupt partition information, so my drive is not booting anymore.

Right now I'm running off a Live CD version of Knoppix 3.3 (i think that's the right version?)...

So is there any way to recover my Win partitions??

Please help!

Thanks!!

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Btw, I've found the one of the windows partitions that I can recover files from (yes I'm a total and utter LInux n00b... no flames pls... i'm panicking right now)... but i'm being told that I don't have sufficient priviliges to access those dirs. Are they restricted to root access? Are they locked out due to some NTFS issues?

Edit: Going through the console, apparently those files are all owned by 'root'. The directories are showing up as files, but they all appear to be 0 kb in size.

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Why exactly would you merge partitions without backing up data first?

I don't trust PM enough to do something like that without backing up first.. I just now trust it to resize without backing up :p

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why r u using Linux to do that ? get yourself a PE-Builder CD and troubleshoot with that.

I'm using Linux because it's the only way I can get online right now :) and because I once heard on these forums from someone that they used utilities that come with Knoppix to rescue someone's failed Win hdd.

And yeah, I know I should've backed up... hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20 :)

Oh, and as for the PE-Builder CD, it appears as if it requires WinXP Pro slip-streamed w/ SP1... which I don't have and can't get right now. As well, I dont' think Knoppix comes with burning software does it?

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to add my experience with testdisk: it works like a charm. it scans for partitions, and recovers the bits that tells the OS that it is there. in other words, it does not try to recover file by file by copying it to another media like many proprietary windows tool does.

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Yeah, partition magic, like the metric system, is truly the tool of the devil. I have had EXCELLENT success with Paragon's Partition Manager, and my buddy has had some luck with Acronis too, so I'd stick to either one of those. If you need to recover the data to another hard drive, I only use Winternals Disk Commander.

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