Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer
If you’ve ever asked for help with your Windows computer that won’t boot anymore, you’ve probably been told to “Backup all your data and then reinstall”… but if you can’t boot, how can you get to your data? That’s the question we’ll be answering today.
One of the easiest methods to access your data is to simply boot off an Ubuntu Live CD… and it’s completely free (except for the cost of a blank cd).
Burn an Ubuntu Live CD
If you have another computer, you can download and burn the Ubuntu Live CD using a very simple application called ImgBurn. Otherwise, you can bug one of your friends to help you burn a copy.
Just open up ImgBurn, and click the icon to “Write image file to disc”
Then click on the icon next to “Source”, pick the downloaded ISO file, stick a recordable CD into the drive, and click burn.
Now that you have the boot cd (which you should keep in a safe place, as it’s very useful), just stick it in the drive of the computer and boot from it. You should see an option to “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer”.
Once the system has started up, the first thing you want to do is choose Places \ Computer from the menu.
This should show you all the drives available in the system, including your Windows drive. In my case, that is the 52.4 GB volume.
You can try and double-click on the drive to open it… and if it immediately works then lucky you! Most of the time it’s going to give you an error saying “Unable to mount the volume”, because Windows didn’t shut it down cleanly.
Click the Details link so that you can see the full message, and leave this window open. You’ll see a “Choice 2″ in the message, which includes the commands to force Ubuntu to use that drive even though there’s something wrong.
What you’ll want to do is open a new Terminal from Applications \ Accessories \ Terminal on the top menu. Once you’ve done that, then you’ll want to type in a bunch of commands, which I’ll walk you through.
First, we’ll want to switch to “administrator” mode, which in Linux terms is known as “root”. The simplest way to do it is with this command:
sudo /bin/bash
Now we’ll need to create a directory that we’ll mount the drive on. The full explanation of mounting drives is a little complex, so just run this command:
mkdir /media/disk
Now comes the tricky part. You’ll need to type out a command very similar to this one, but you’ll need to replace /dev/sda1 with what you see in that message box we showed you above. This command tells Ubuntu to use the ntfs-3g driver, and force mount even if there is a problem.
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force
If your drive is FAT32 instead of NTFS, then you can use the following command instead:
mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/sda1 /media/disk
If you are having problems figuring out whether you have NTFS or FAT32, and you can’t figure out which /dev/whatever to use, then type in the following command at your prompt (make sure you already ran the command to run things as root)
fdisk -l
In the output you should see a lot more information about the available drives… you can see in this example that the filesystem type is NTFS and the device name is /dev/sda1.
At this point, you should be able to access your hard drive through the icon in Computer.
Note: If you have more than one drive in the computer, or more than one partition, they should show up separately in Computer. You should perform the same steps as above to open those drives up as well.
Backing Up to External USB
The absolute simplest thing to do at this point is to plug in an external USB drive, which should place an icon on the Ubuntu desktop, and most likely immediately pop up a nautilus window showing the contents of the drive.
Note: I plugged in a USB Flash drive for illustration… it would be better to plug in a full external USB drive so you’ll have more space for backups.
What Should I Backup?
If you aren’t extremely technical, you might be wondering what on earth you should be backing up… and that’s a very good question.
1) Best Method
If you have loads of empty space on your external drive or network share, you should simply backup the entire contents of the drive, and sort through it later. It’ll take a little longer, but at least that way you can be sure everything has been backed up.
2) Still Good
You should try and backup your entire user folder… on XP you’ll go to “Documents and Settings”, and on Vista you’ll go to “Users”, and you should see your username in the list:
You can simply copy this entire folder to your backup drive, which should contain your music, documents, bookmarks, and most of your important files.
Important Note: This will not backup your application files, and you should look around your drive and see if you’ve saved anything important somewhere else. This is especially true if you have more than one drive. Again, your best bet is to simply backup everything.
Backing Up to Network Share
If you would rather backup your drive to a network share on another computer, you can use the Places \ Connect to Server item on the menu.
Change the Service type menu to “Windows share”…
And then enter in the details for your network drive, with these being the required fields:
- Server: Computer Name
- Share: Shared Folder Name
- User Name: your username
Once you click the Connect button, you’ll be prompted to enter in your password. Typically you can leave Domain set to the default, but if you have a custom workgroup name you should enter that instead. I also chose the “Remember password until you logout” button just so I won’t have to enter the password again.
Once you click the Connect button you should have an icon on the desktop for your network share.
Now you can open up the network share, and if everything is setup correctly on the shared folder side of things, you can copy all of your files across the network using the instructions above on which files to choose.
At this point you should have a backup of your data. If you backed up to an external hard drive, you might want to consider also copying those files to another computer just in case, and if you copied across the network you could consider backing that up elsewhere as well.
Now you can proceed with reinstalling or whatever else you’d like to do. If you are having issues, be sure to leave them on our forum.
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Wow, not only a great article, but just when i needed it! My mum’s computer just died and i thought, “i wonder if HTG has anything?”
Hi!
Now that Linux saved your windows a** so fine, you might also consider to give it a share on your computer when you reinstall it anyway
.
For me, Linux works 99% of my tasks (in Germany, making a tax report is a big thing, there seems to be no other than Windows software for it), so I started using Ubuntu on a regular basis.
I only boot up windows for 1.) itunes (there are alternatives in Linux, but I like iTunes), 2.) Premiere Elements (I paid for that software, so I’ gonna use it
and once a year for the tax report thing ….
Surfing, photo handling, even some old DOS games that do not work on XP anymore do run fine.
The hardest thing is to decide which Linux to use….
Regards,
SuAlfons
great tip..will recommend this article to some of my needy friends.
thanks for the tutorial
Good article. I’m a windows-only user, but I easily managed to dl the ISO file, burn it to CD, then boot from it. A suggestion: update the article to remind the user that he might need to make a bios change to get the pc to boot from a cd.
One question: while it booted, there was lots of action from the hard disk light. I definitely selected the option to run directly from CD. So why does the live cd seem to be reading or writing the hd?
@TC
You make a very good point, I should add that to the article.
On some computers, the light is not just for hard drive, but for any drive… that would be my guess. Otherwise, I assume that the live cd is reading from the hard drive to detect all the partitions, etc.
To be fair it can save you when a Linux machine dies as well. My wife’s laptop (mostly used for email reading) wouldn’t boot anymore, and believe it or not I was actually able to put the “Does freezing a hard drive bring it back from the dead?” question to the test.
Yes, it does! I used my live boot CD to get my own Windows machine (work laptop) into Linux, then used a USB connection to access her cold but alive drive long enough to get her files off. Windows by itself would still not access the drive, but Linux had no problems.
Excellent article The Geek. I think everyone should have this CD in their collection, JUST IN CASE.
I had this problem last week-ened !!!!!!!!!!
I tried to backup files in my Windows HDD but couldn’t as I couldn’t mount it, so I’ve formattedthe HDD and reinstalled Windows.
if only this tip would have been posted last week
anyway thanks, i’ll keep it handy…. we never know
I love ubuntu, but would something like puppy linux not be equally suited to this use? smaller to download and quicker to boot.
Great suggestion, you also could use Puppy Linux, must smaller distro only 98mb, or Mepis to do the same thing.
@Bob
You are absolutely right, there are a ton of Linux distros and almost any of them would work.
I chose Ubuntu for the article since it’s the most widely known, and there’s a lot more support online for it than any other distro. I figure the people reading/using this article are likely to be Windows users, so Ubuntu would be the simplest solution for them that “just works” out of the box. The point isn’t to promote Ubuntu as much as it is to solve the problem =)
Another cool thing about Ubuntu 8.04 is that it can be installed in Windows without the need to repartition the HDD. I have now set up my system to dual-boot into Vista or Ubuntu using this install method.
I always new it could be done, but I had never had too… yet.
Thanks for another awesome “how to”
Mark
Fantastic article! I’ve been using this technique for a long time to recover and repair computers broken through Windows’s incompetence. Actually, I use a Gentoo LiveCD most often, but Ubuntu is rapidly becoming easier and more capable for this stuff, given the facility to install drivers as necessary.
Excellent! How about some steps for restoring a Windows hard disk from these backed-up files?
Very interesting, and highly useful. But the generally recommended way to get a root shell is “sudo -i” and not “sudo /bin/bash” (or any of the myriad other ways to get a root shell)
@LA
There are simply too many methods for starting a root shell… I’ve just always used that one since it ensures that I’m using bash. The point is that it works =)
@offhermeds
That’s not a bad idea, I might consider writing something about that… seems like there are a lot more guides on how to back things up then there are for restoring them…
For those recommending Puppy, you have to take into account that Puppy will not easily work with some monitors, USB keyboards, and so forth. Ubuntu has much better hardware support. For a lot of users (most users probably) Puppy and similar distros will be fine, but Ubuntu will work for a higher percentage of people.
I would recommend using Knopixx for this.
Actually, that is the last thing that you should do: re-install Windows in a fresh installation. You should actually use the Windows XP or Vista repair thing to fix the problems that are keeping Windows from starting.
Thus far, I have wrecked my system 3 times with my own stupidity since I got a Windows Vista computer, and every time that Repair Boot choice that appears when you use the XP or Vista disc to boot your system.
There is very rarely an occasion where I totally have to wipe someone’s computer in order to fix it anymore…. in fact, I’ve never had to do that unless the person in question told me “I have a very recent backup” and they wanted me to do that.
This is a great article , thanks a lot
This works and is a great tip!
-1213
This is great. Thanx ten to the 6! BTW you should consider writing a how to book for Window users that want to switch to Linux Ubuntu because you know Windows and Linux and your explanations are cristal to us dumb windows users
Example: First, we’ll want to switch to “administrator” mode, which in Linux terms is known as “root”.
This I can understand
Couldn’t you have written this 3 days ago? I feel so unlucky. Thanks for the article though, i am sure it will come handy in the future. lol
I thought of this too when my dad’s computer died.
However, on the live CD, it doesn’t see either drive. Not that they can’t be mounted, but they just can’t be seen. Windows can’t even boot. What’s up? Anyone have any ideas?
@The Geek: (”On some computers, the [hard disk access] light is not just for hard drive, but for any drive… that would be my guess [why the hard disk light flashes while the live CD is loading].”)
You’re right. My laptop manual says that the light is for “hard disk access”. However, I now notice that it flashes in exact synchronization with the CD drive light, which is on the side of the laptop where I don’t normally see it.
Between using WINE and a full blown Windows Virtual PC… the dependence on Windows is almost completely disappeared. WINE allows me to finally get rid of my windows partition.
Ubuntu is the best os and i have it on my laptop but im a gamer so i have windows on my desktop.
And I will try the live cd thing to back up files next time my pc dies
Great article, thanks!
It realy came in handy when my parents laptop refused to boot and went BSOD on me.
I download the iso of ubuntu, but isn´t the option “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer”….my iso is this Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition – Supported to 2011…why I not see that option???
Thank you for your help……
Hi great article easy to understand. But I have a problem.
I´m trying to recover files from a chrashed xp home pc. But when I run ubuntu live and click the “computer folder”, there are no icons for the hard disk. just for my dvd drive and 2 usb drives. Does anyone have an idea on how to make them visible?
The pc has 2 sata disks and they are setup in a raid,
I followed the instructions exactly as written but when I booted from the CD rom I got a box saying I/O error when I click try Ubuntu without any changes. It said Error reading boot CD. I burned the disc several times so I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Does anyone have suggestions as to what I need to do?
nikujin:
Try burning the ISO file at the lowest possible speed. I had issues with my Live CD burned from an ISO, until a kind soul on LinuxForums suggested I try a slow burn speed.
You are my life saver.Thanks!!!
My sister’s Windows on her laptop just died today. This is super helpful. Thanks
Thank you so much for this! I have known of people to use Ubuntu before to save their files, but I had never heard of the “unable to mount” notification. This helped me really understand that message and how to fix it! My computer recently gave me the “system32\config\system file is corrupt or missing”, and I have so many files on my computer I didn’t want to lose.
So again, Thank you for your extremely helpful article!
Hi there,
I thought to do this exact thing. I am waiting for my external hard drive to arrive. For now am running the LiveCD…a bit tedious since I have to be loading all the add ons I need each time. Am a little skeptical about partitioning from the LiveCD and messing with my Windows files (unbacked up). So I’ll do with it for now. I also tried installing from the CD straight as I did before…but the guided option to use what size of the partition is not available and all I see if the option to use it all (format my entire drive) so I canceled.
My big issue here is…over the years I have added quite a bit of things to my PC. I know where to backup the usual suspects such as my User folder in vista, the items on my desktop, C: that I saved, IE favorites. But what I don’t know is how do I backup or find a list of my Firefox add ons (themes, extensions) and bookmarks from within Ubuntu while accessing my hard drove? Also…what about my Opera bookmarks and skins? And lastly…how do I backup my Outlook 2007 also from Ubuntu?
That is pretty much all I don’t know how to…I can also use the Programs folder to get a list of the programs I have installed…but is there yet another way to get a list from Ubuntu also? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am so close…I just want to seal the deal.
Thanks again.
This is Cool, awesome. Booting up a dead harddisk in my opinion is a headache, thanks a lot.
Thank you very much for a well written article and it was perfect for retrieving data I thought was gone gone gone after the BSOD. Linux looks pretty good as a reasult I’m a convert!
Thanks again
Thanks a lot for the valuable info. It was a life saver!
i did the exact same thing little ago, yesterday I encountered a problem. I can not see any drive while booting from ubuntu. XP is crashed. but I know, there is hard drive. on computer, it only shows filesystem.
also, I have admin password in XP, but I believe that as the OS is different, that does not effect and Drive should be visible.
why it happened , any idea??
I very successfully recommended this to my step-daughter to rescue files off a disk from a dead XP system that couldn’t be accessed when installed as a second disk in the new computer she got.
The thing I advised her to do – which I would strongly advise you to recommend in your article – was to make sure any files copied to her USB flash drive were virus checked before she copied them to the new computer. After all, one of the reasons Windows systems get corrupted and won’t work is down to virus infections.
is it posible to burn a back up dvd with ubuntu? Thank you for this article! saved my life!
Nice workups on how to revive Data, kudos my Friend.
Hello, thanks for such a nice article.
My Windows Xp crash nearley, and I booted from an ubuntu live cd.
Than I connected an externel hard disk to copy windows files (under my documents and settings)
but when i try to copy, I get the message that i dont have the permission to copy, so I dont know what to do.
Could anyone help plz?
ya u can do that but, if you have BART PE you can do the same thing and CHKDSK and fix the drive and even turn off Services and problematic drivers!! And start the PC up!!!
I’m using this same setup to grab all the user data off a broken Vista laptop (won’t run or re-install) and scp (read “copy” if you are a non-techie) the files to another server. The laptop is relatively new, 1.6Ghz dual-core, 1GB of RAM, etc. The system seems to spend a lot of time waiting for the ntfs-3g module (system load is very low, wait very high) then performs several reads/writes fast, then back to wait for a couple minutes. Any suggested tweaking to improve file transfer performance (I already switched from wireless to wired and from rsync to scp (was taking forever to build file list)). I’m almost done with this PC, but am looking for better performance next time. Something like half the network media speed instead of 1% or slower. It’s Gutsy Gibbon, by the way. Functionally excellent, but slow.
I run a home PC repair business and have been using ubuntu for exactly this kind of fix for a couple of years now.
For a laptop I use the ubuntu cd, and actually I don’t use the terminal to sort the ntfs issue, I simply go to the add/remove programs and type ntfs in the search (all software) and it does the download and install for me. This saves alot of buggering about.
I have a fat32 hard drive to back up onto, this appears on the ubuntu desktop, so the whole thing is drag-and-drop.
For a desktop I simply connect a usb hard drive connector to the back of the ide or sata drive and plug it into my macbook, and boing, the hard drive appears on my desktop. It takes about 30 secs which includes taking the side off the desktop.
tug
I always backup important pr0n files to and fro between machines on my LAN, then when Windows gets cruddy I just wipe the drive, reinstall an OS, and copy the files back again over the network.
Seems to be a bit of a long winded approach, but for a free solution, not bad.
I just recently just purchased Acronis TrueImage as I new my wifes laptop hard disk was about to go.
I installed it on the laptop, created a backup CD (Boot CD from the Acronis menu)
Booted the laptop from the CD
Did an image backup via the lan to my PC (could not backup 3 sectors)
Got a new HD and put it in.
Booted from the cd and restored the image via the lan to the new hard disk
Rebooted the laptop and all works.
(The 3 bad sectors has files which she does not use)
All up, 1 hr to do the backup.
10 minutes to change hard disk
50 minute to restore the image.
“Most of the time it’s going to give you an error saying “Unable to mount the volume”,
because Windows didn’t shut it down cleanly”
A minor suggestion – I would suggest adding the “-r” or “-o ro” flags to use readonly when mounting the drive. Having the additional safety net of not being able to damage the filesystem by writing to it is a nice thing.
Freddy,
Nice that you use Acronis TrueImage since it boot’s into Linux LiveCD to perform the operations you needed. If you booted a non-graphical Linux (not Ubuntu), you will notice the initial Acronis boot and Linux boot is the same. Acronis is Windows looking GUI on Linux LiveCD. Hit ctl-alt-F1 or is it ctl-alt-f2 and Acronis drops to limited Linux shell mode. Keep cycling from F3-F7 to get back to Acronis Windows GUI.
Do I have to use ImgBurn or can I use Nero?
Any special Settings in Nero that I need to be aware of?
thanks
DC
Great tip. I´ve been using this strategy for several months, but I would run the “ntfsfix /dev/yourfixeddisk” command before trying to mount with the ntfs-3g module. This fixes the partition errors and therefore there is no need to do the “-force” option in the mounted partition.
Nice Guide. I have been already using this method when XP starts giving problem.
Liked Ubuntu so much, that I switched over to it.
Great post, I had to do this once and had no convenient guide like this. I got stuck at the mounting the drive part so props to this guy for explaining it clearly.
I just did this last week on one of my friend’s kids laptops with SUSE! I felt clever!
I got really excited when I read this, but everytime I try to boot I have the same problem nikujin (above) did.
When I click “try Ubuntu without any changes” it says “Error reading boot CD”. I burned the disc several times (on both CDs and DVDs) and I have tried using the slowest write rate possible, but it makes no difference. Does anyone have suggestions as to what I need to do?
If you can’t get the machine to boot from any cd, there’s likely some other problem going on. The problem could be memory, motherboard, or just with the cdrom itself.
@ The Geek
The computer will boot into Windows (from hard disk), but windows is severly “broken”. I cannot transfer any files from anywhere to anywhere (the option is available, but nothing happens when I actually tell the computer to move or copy the files…whether it’s to an external drive, second internal drive, or to CD or DVD). It cannot connect to the network or online alone and many, but not all, programs will not run. I am planning to use system restore, but I am trying to backup my huge amount of data first. That’s why this seemed like a perfect solution, but like I said above, the Ubuntu disk is read, at least enough to get me to the boot menu, but when I choose to “Try Ubuntu without any changes” it says “Error reading boot CD”. It just seems odd that my drives are working, and my computer can boot windows (albeit broken), but I keep getting this “Error reading boot CD” message.
I think I figured out the problem. I looked at the file size of each Ubuntu file I downloaded (I had to do it several times before “successful”). They were all far too small…my downloads “completed” before the entire file finished transferring…I’ll just have to try again until I get the whole thing…
I HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM AS LEONARDO!!!!! “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer” is not there, instead, in the middle of the options is something that says rescue crashed computer or something like that…. I clicked that and they said error reading disc
Help me please, or send me to an article or forum that can
is this only for vista? because it dosent work on my windows xp???
I just want to say thank you for this article. Although I never successfully Dl’d Ubuntu, I used Puppy Linux (Thanks Gary P) which was a much smaller (and therefore easier) download, and it worked flawlessly. It saved me a ton of time, money, and hassle. Thanks!
I have the same problem as others. I have a dead laptop hard drive and when I go into Computer, it is not recognized. Can anyone help me with this, I’m trying to get pictures. Thanks.
Master like!!!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THIS HELP. you saved my data!!
I am having the same problem as Ananta. I don’t see my hard drive. I don’t see that this was answered. Can anyone help?
ananta
i did the exact same thing little ago, yesterday I encountered a problem. I can not see any drive while booting from ubuntu. XP is crashed. but I know, there is hard drive. on computer, it only shows filesystem.
also, I have admin password in XP, but I believe that as the OS is different, that does not effect and Drive should be visible.
why it happened , any idea??
Thanks a million, you helped me save my brothers travelpictures on his crashed laptop.
Thanks
thank you very much for this great tutorial on how to save data from xp..my brother was in trouble with his notebook…and now his docs are safe in the external hd.
thanx from Italy
Valentina
I don’t have an external or usb drive, can i just hook my laptop to my comp while doing this and transfer my files that way? i have a Vista laptop and XP computer.
[Jared
I got really excited when I read this, but everytime I try to boot I have the same problem nikujin (above) did.
When I click "try Ubuntu without any changes" it says "Error reading boot CD". I burned the disc several times (on both CDs and DVDs) and I have tried using the slowest write rate possible, but it makes no difference. Does anyone have suggestions as to what I need to do?]
Did you burn the boot disk as an image file(ISO) ? To create a BOOTABLE CD of the OS you must burn it as a ISO image.
When i try to boot from the cd it gets to the part where i choose “try ubunto without any change to your computer” then it goes to a black screen with white writing saying ” requires x88-64CPU, only detected an i1586CPU” Then i cant do anything
I used the desktop version and have tried both the available PC types.
Its a Dell dimension 5000 that im tyring to do this on.
Any ideas?
Hornzog, your computer is 32bit and your trying the 64bit version…go back and download the 32bit version. Down the i386 version. It is used for Pentium 1-4. i386 does not mean fro 386 computer….
Thanks,
that was very helpful.
Lukas
thank you so much! i got as far as the live cd on my own thinking but i couldnt figure out how to mount the drive until i saw this amazing article
I did this but encountered a problem. Note: as was a “lucky one” and was able to seemingly access the Computer’s hard drive.
I connected an external HDD and copied folders under the C drive into a folder I created for this backup process.
There is enough room on this external HDD for the at least 40 GB but I only need about ~26 GB if I copied the whole C drive — which I plan to do.
I copied a few folders without any messages intervening.
Here is the problem:
I tried to copy Documents and settings and get a message: “Error while copying “DSCF9166.JPG”.
There was an error copying the file into /media/WD USB 2/(backup folder name)/(documents and settings/user/my documents/My Pictures/…more of the directory(of the path on the folder I clicked “copy” on)”
“Show more details
Error opening file ‘/media/(same directory as above except /DSCF9166.JPG’: No such file or directory”
Why does this message occur? I did the same process of clicking “copy” on the C drive folder I wanted and clicking “paste” in the external HDD’s backup folder.
The options are “Cancel” “Skip all” “Skip”.
I don’t know what to do from here.
Thank you for the post.
I have just one simple question.
Why couldn’t this be done with RHEL? SuSE? CentOS? Debian? Gentoo?
It’s frustrating to see that so many people are lauding Ubuntu as the ‘catch all’ linux distro. One of the things I don’t want to see is ‘Linux’ becoming synonymous with ‘Ubuntu’.
Reading the article, there is no instruction that is Ubuntu/Debian specific (apt-get, debpkg, etc) So the exact same method would work on any distro that had the GNOME desktop.
I would suggest that you state “You could do this with a similar linux distro” in your article, instead of directly pandering to Ubuntu.
Just my two cents.
I know you tried to walk through the “tricky part” slowly, but I am still confused. I can you re- explain it in different words? I’m lost with these words,”You’ll need to type out a command very similar to this one, but you’ll need to replace /dev/sda1 with what you see in that message box we showed you above.” What exactly do I need to type when I can’t mount the drive?
[1000.XXXXXX] SQUASHFS error: Unable to read fragment cache block [xxxxx]
[1000.XXXXXX] SQUASHFS error: Unable to read page, block XXXdXXXe. size 5b48
[1000.XXXXXX] SQUASHFS error: sb_bread failed reading block 0xa5778
why this appeared in my screen and what is the solution. Please help me…
As another user mentioned- perfect timing! My PC took a dump on me last week and this article saved me with minimal hassle. Biggest gripe was that it took an hour to d/l Ubuntu on my roommate’s crappy laptop…
Thanks.
Thanks for the POST.
This was VERY useful. I think the Vista Machine I was dealing with had a virus and I had no way to back up the data on any of my other Windows machine… how ridiculous?!?!?
I’m glad I already had a irtual Machine of Ubuntu 7 on one of my machine, it saved my day.
Thanks
Thank you so much!
I am another frenchie with similar comments! I am so glad I had a Ubuntu Live CD handy and your instructions through a second machine borrowed from work si that I was able to salvage data from my hard disk.
It was daunting at first as I had never seen Terminal before (but heard of it); your instructions were so easy to follow it all happened as if by magic.
You saved my day, my week, the past month (date of my last backup).
My son’s laptop went south and I tried to recover it with a Linux Live CD. I was able to mount the drive but I got a message that I did not have permission to look at the contents of the folder. Has anyone tried this on a Mac? He has about $500 worth of ITunes downloads on it.
Thanks.
I agree with Sai Wolf, too many of the articles are specific to Ubuntu, I understand you have to use Ubuntu for the example as you can’t have all the distros on your computer but it would be nice if you said that the same can be done with almost any distro. Personally I prefer Mandriva Free as it had far better out of the box support for my laptop than Ubuntu.
On another note, I suggested this method to someone on the forum to back up their data and they said it is asking for a username and password.
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....?replies=3
any ideas?
Nice, but as others have mentioned, this isn’t Ubuntu specific. Personally, I have a nice geekstick that has a linux system on it for this situation, or if it’s my laptop, I just boot into my linux and backup from there.
Except since I wasn’t too interested in files at the time, I just used dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/backup with gzip in there somehow (I’m still waking up, so don’t expect complex command lines until my 2th cup of coffee) and that worked as well.
The only problem I see here is if the FAT/Whatever they call it in NTFS is corrupted, then you might not get your files. And never never NEVER do an rm * -rf on a corrupted drive mounted in your live system, because the corruption can cause the rm process to jump out of the sub-directory (ie: where you mounted it) and into the ROOT!! Been there, done that, feel stoopid. Shuddabin working from a live-cd, then it’s not a problem…
my $.50 worth. (inflation, y’know…)
My problem with windows xp is that the user32.dll file is missing so I can’t start it. I have used the Ubuntu cd to backup files, as you suggested, but is there a way I can copy a new user32.dll file into the windows folders? It says it is not possible, but this would solve the problem.
Is is doable? How? I know almost no console linux language!
@ Pedro Lerias
Not a techie, so don’t know the answer. However, do you know how the .dll disapeared? Are you using AVG? There’s a lot in the news atm about AVG incorrectly identyfing that particular system file as a trojan. Worth contanting AVG if this is the case as theres a years sub of AVG proffesional by the way of an apology.
Hi Neil,
That was exactly what happened, as I learned later. It took me by surprise and I didn’t realise the mistake until it was too late. I ended up simply saving all my files using Ubuntu CD and reinstalling everything. I lost a day of work, something AVG won’t pay back, I’m sure!
Thanks worked great for recovering files from a bad vista installation. I moved the files over the network and resinstalled with no problems.
Hi,
I followed the directions to a T, and I was able to open my drive, but I cannot see the files. It says there is still 26GB of free disk space left, so I know it knows somethings on there, but I cannot see any folders/directories.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
sc
(Ps, not a techie. A dumbed down solution would be preferrable)
I was one of the ‘lucky ones’ and my hdd immediately appeared once Ubuntu loaded. However, I don’t have the “permission” to drag/drop to the external hdd. How do I get around this? I’m using 7.04 Ubuntu Live on a dead Vista laptop with a NTFS external hdd.
Everything was going smoothly for me until I had to plug in a USB device. Ubuntu would not recognize anything I plugged in. I decided to restart the system with a USB device already plugged in. Ubuntu found the device, but couldn’t mount it. I followed the steps for force mounting the device. UBuntu now found my USB device, but I could no longer access the hard drive inside my computer that I am trying to rescue (I was able to access this drive before force mounting the USB drive). When I click on my hard drive’s icon, it opens up my USB drive’s window. I have no idea what to do!
I did notice that when Ubuntu was booting up, I saw several cryptic errors about USB addresses not responding. I don’t know if that means anything.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
20 gigs of family photos on a laptop; after a failed update, of course, Vista was unable to restart; imagine how happy i was when i had found your guide; many thanks for helping me recovering precious memories; THANK YOU
Thank you so much for the article. This just saved 8gb of photos and videos from the last 3 years of my life.
Hey, thanks heaps for that!
awesome article.
however, i have a little problem. i’ve been trying to do this with my friend’s laptop but after all the coding, where u said that “now you should be able to access your drive through Computer”, it STILL doesn’t allow me to access it!
Can I please get some assistance with this? I posted this on the forum earlier but i’m in need for a quick reply so i apologise for posting my problem in the comments section!
Thanks heaps!!
Follow the steps given, and it works marvelously. Straight I recommended it to my friends. Looking forward for more great tips.
Hey I tried your idea but sadly my “cannot mount volume” detail was different from yours.It says:
Record 6 has no FILE magic (0*0)Failed to open inode:input/outpu error Failed to mount ‘/dev/hda1′:input/output error NTFS is either inconsistent,or you have hardware faults,or you have a SoftRAID/FakeRaid hardware………
If goes on to tell me to solve them by using chkdsk in Windows(cant do that…cant get into windows) or if I have that FakeRAID hardware to activate it and mount different device …..I dont have any hardware plugged in…Just The Windows on the problematic disk and the Ubuntu live cd in the cd rom .
I am very new to linux..I even tried your force mount commands to see if it will still work…It came back with the same message…Record 6 has no FILE magic……
Maybe you know something else I can do with Linux Ubuntu….I tried UBCD and Bart PE…Windows XP Recovery and other linux live cd…they all leave me with a blank black screen…checking hardware configuration or somthing like that it the last thing I see then nothing.
Its the disk problem I am sure…tried other disk and it worked…the laptop even booted up with live cd without a hard drive connected.I tried all jumper settings and boot Order.
I hope you can help me…you were on the right track.Again I am new to linux but your post was so detailed and easy to follow…I hope you can help. Or anyone that can suggest a way
Thanks again
Not sure if this possibility was in the comments above, but I just used an uBuntu Live CD to boot a Dell laptop that had picked up a nasty drive-by infection while doing research on a website. There were rogue dll’s and temp files and batch files all over the place. I was able to find and delete most of these in Windows BUT there was one controlling dll that refused to be trashed. As long as that file was there, the infection kept coming back.
Booting off the uBuntu Live CD allowed me to zap that final file and clear the infection from the laptop. Sweet!
Hi
I did as instructed, i see my drive, it is a seagate 500gb st3500830a, 7200.10, running 3.aad frimware. this shows up in ubuntu as a scsi drive,the dialog comes up saying unable to mount location, not cannot mount volume. it does not come up with any details click. is there any other way to get the data or am i doing somethng wrong ?
First time crash and I was able to transfer everything I needed/ that hadn’t been backed up quite easily to my external. Saved me some serious time and money! Thank you so much!
Hey, thanks for a great guide. Got everything to work with the USB boot etc. But when I’m inside Ubuntu and go to Computer, my HD isn’t showing. Any hope to revive it? When I boot my PC normally, I can hear it spinning, but it seems like it doesn’t get in “gear”.
Any help would be great, thanks!
so i got to veiw the folders but all my music didnt show up except like 4 were there.. uh oh..
sould something go wrong? or are they sum how ghidden? im copying EVERYTHING and putting it on the d drive and reinstalling windows. i heard it wouldnt effect the d drive.?
Hi
I got a problem with my pc. after getting a virus I installed a cracked copy of norton 2009.
But when I restarted the pc windows didn’t want to load. so after many attempts I tried system recovery but it did not let me access the copy of windows installed. after I tried to repair windows hoping to solve the problem with the original cd, but even the repair process was not concluded successfully.
Can I use ubuntu to access the important files I had in the hard drive? Did repair affect my files?
Please help…
What a great howto! I was able to use this step-for-step and helped my friend recover his pictures, music and documents that he had otherwise considered lost forever!
Thank you so much for this wonderful tutorial. Just using it to restore the files to my Synology NAS. Perfectly well written, wonderfully illustrated and furthermore it saves all my data from the last year. Love this!
I had been doing this stuff from like three years ago when dapper rolled around. I got a kubuntu liveCD from a friend and when my (at the time XP MCE 2k5) windoze box went belly up that kubuntu disc allowed me to pull my 12GB worth of personal stuff off the HD to my external HD, from that moment I downloaded Ubuntu dapper and kept using it until now that I use Ubuntu Ultimate edition. I also started fixing unbootable friends and relatives PC’s with just an external HD and that kubuntu CD. And with the testdisk tool I could salvage the valuable data from one friend’s HD that had it’s partition table thoroughly destroyed (dunno how, but it was trashed badly). And in another case I could even disinfect a winxp PC that had literally layers upon layers of malware in it.
I followed all the tutorial all worked fine until i wanted to find windows and theres is nothing to find maybe its gone altogether..i only wanted to retrieve pics and music…
Thank you so much! This helped me enormously today. Shame that wireless wouldn’t work, but a wired link to a local PC worked just fine. Thank you!
This worked for me like magic. Thanks a lot.
I had Fedora Code(FC) 6 and XP Enterprise Installed in my hard drive. I couldn’t boot my laptop with XP and used to get an error message like “1720-Hard drive detects Imminent failure”. So data in the partiton used by XP was lost. I was able to ignore the error message using ‘F1′ key and boot my laptop with FC6. I tried ‘dd’ command when my system is up with FC6 to browse and copy data from the partiton used by XP but it didn’t work.
Finally, I was able to boot my laptop with Ubuntu Live CD, force mount my XP-partition and copy the data to external hard drive.
Thanks a lot to those who wrote the above post. Amazing!!!!
thanks. very helpful.
Fantastic article, you’ve just helped me save my family photo collection! Thanks for all your effort!
Wow, this is perfect. Such clear simple instructions. I’ve always meant to find out how to use linux and I got to have my first tutorial by recovering hundreds of irreplaceable documents, pictures, and music files from my old broken computer. Thank you.
Hi all,
I have followed this guide step by step and like a few others my laptop’s hard drive is not being displayed in the ‘computer-file browser’…my only options are the dvd drive, but I can see no sign of my internal hard drive!
Can anyone please give me any help or advice on how
Hi all,
I am trying to use Ubuntu to back up all of my pictures, etc onto an external hard drive as my laptop has died and I cannot access anything at all.
I have followed this guide step by step and like a few others my laptop’s hard drive is not being displayed in the ‘computer-file browser’…my only options are the dvd drive, but I can see no sign of my internal hard drive!
Can anyone please give me any help or advice on how I can make my internal hard drive be recognised by Ubuntu?
I have alot of pictures of my sons first year of life which I will be devastated to lose..
Please help, it will be much appreciated…
Thanks
Great article! Tanx,..
Only one problem,. ive plugged in two diferent usb drives,.. but none is automaticly found,. What do i do now?
Martin
Tried a usb stick wich is found,.. but none of my usb harddrives
You write in here that “plug in an external USB drive, which should place an icon on the Ubuntu desktop, and most likely immediately pop up a nautilus window showing the contents of the drive.”
but what if it dont pop up,.. what do i do then?
I really need to transfer some big files so very thankful for help..
This is the error I get, very similar to the error Dsherlock got:
Once I do the force mount this is the error I get:
NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows TWICE. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If you have SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the ‘dmraid’ documentation
for the details.
CAN ANYONE HELP ME SOLVE THIS PROBLEM HELP ME RECOVER MY WINDOWS FILES?
I figured I had nothing to lose, so I gave this a shot. I had to reboot my computer a few times to finally get Ubuntu(sp) to load. The commands were sort of clear. I had to try several different commands before I found one that worked. The Hard Drive did show up. The properties said it had an NTSF file system but the with the commands I had to use Vfat cause it said the drive had a Fat12. May have worked better if I had avoided the Windows repair program all together since that is when I first couldn’t read the drive in Safe mode and then ran this instead. Fortunately I got most of the files I wanted before I turned my computer off which is how I found out it had crashed. But this Ubuntu thing is kinda cool so I’m gonna hold on to it.
I want to make note that this isn’t the first time I had a HD crash on me. The first time I paid over $500 to have the files extracted – which I had quotes of over $1000. I knew better to back up my files but I never did. I was able to save stuff this time but I lost alot of Emails. To read that someone is losing his sons pictures I just cringe and say that if the pics are that important, you might want to look into a data extraction service.
solved…
tanx anyway
That is a good method to save files from a NTFS partition. Too bad it wasn’t what I needed a week ago when my NTFS partition on my first HD went out along with the bootloader and a lot of files. Windows would no long boot and in Ubuntu the drive showed up as corrupted and couldn’t do anything with it. The only thing that saved it was a repair CD called Emergency Boot Disk. It was a live version of Windows XP with nothing but tools for saving, repairing, and backing up files from dead Windows partitions. It was the only thing I found that would read the corrupted partition. I just backed up all my files I wanted to another HD with a NTFS partition and Wiped the first NTFS partition free and reinstalled the boot loader.
My problem was a bit more than this tutorial could have handled though. If all you have is a drive with messed up system files in Windows so it becomes unbootable or a bootloader not configured properly then boot up that ubuntu CD.
Hi read all the forums. I have a toshiba satellte p305-s8825 , I cant restore my window and Im stuck rebooting over and over again. I just bought a 500 gb external drive to back up my computer and I can see everything in the ubuntu program but it wont mount my 500gb drive. I just want to get into my computer . Is ubuntu live different from the regular one because I need all the help I can get. How are you guys deleting bad files and viruses, Im willing to try anything now . I have about 10,000 songs my computer holds 320 gb so Im hurting man. HELLLLLLLLLLLLLP Please
Had some luck I restarted my computer with the drive attached and it picked it right up. I just wanna know how can I repair my system startup with all the files on had .
I was also one of the lucky ones even though i received a mount location error message. However none of the files I have gained access to are ones I need. Everything that is missing appears to be what was administrator protected. Any hints on how to access that information?
Just now, Kaspersky eff-ed up my system. The system simply won’t boot. Safe mode, Latest Config that worked, etc, etc. But, it seems that lot of people faced this kind of problem with Kaspersky because of the way it likes to install and handle system files. I’m quite aware of what I did for the installation. Since there was no way booting the system, I was wondering where I would backup my files and how. I was always wondering what to do if a linux live distro couldn’t identify the partition. Thanks to your system, I could force mount it. Now, I’m on Dreamlinux and backing up the most important data and thankfully the data is less.
Ciao!
If the icon for your hard drive doesn’t appear, then just go through the steps described above for mounting via the command line, the disk is probably ‘/dev/sda1′. After doing so, I accessed the data via command line by typing “cd /media/disk”. After typing this command, the icon appeared in the ‘computer’ area and I was able to access things via the GUI. Hope this helps!
THANK YOU SO MUCH! my computer died.. keep rebooting by itself.. couldnt even go into safe mode whatsoever even after using COMPAQS recovery partition to repair the computer.. at first i used an older version of ubuntu that didnt work.. with the latest version 8.10 i believed. i booted from cd.. accessed my files thru the guide above.. and the rest was history.. i thought my problem was serious.. if u ever need emergency backup of files.. this is the guide!! one comment though.. just follow the steps that the error message gives you.. the instructions above didnt work for me.. not all portable harddrives will be detected as well. u may have to force mount it as well.. overall, ubuntu saved my life this time. thank you guys!!
This really did save my ‘windows a**’, although in my defense i wanted to use linux…my school just wouldn’t let me. As a result, I almost lost 3 months worth of work when windows crashed on me for no apparent reason…YAY GEEKS!
thanks, it worked fine mounting but when i plug in my usb hard drive it doesnt show up so i have no way of copying my files that i just mounted. is there a way to get to the usb hard drive?
kris
This is the error I get, very similar to the error Dsherlock got:
Once I do the force mount this is the error I get:
NTFS is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows TWICE. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If you have SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the ‘dmraid’ documentation
for the details.
CAN ANYONE HELP ME SOLVE THIS PROBLEM HELP ME RECOVER MY WINDOWS FILES?
I am getting this same error does anyone know how to get around this?
Hi Geek,
Thanks for the recovery guide above. Just wondering if there’s a risk of loosing any data if I try to force mount the try. Just wanna be sure before trying to do that.
Thanks again
Manish
Hi Geek,
Thanks for the recovery guide above. Just wondering if there’s a risk of loosing any data if I try to force mount the DRIVE. Just wanna be sure before trying to do that.
Thanks again
Manish
I thought I’d lost all our pictures, wedding organiser, music collection etc. Until I found this article…it gave me hope. False hope it turns out – my hardrive didn’t even appear on the list.
useless if you have a raid hard drive setup
I am trying to copy the files to an external USB hard drive. I have 55Gb to copy & it is taking ages to copy at the rate of 150-180 KB/sec. Is there a quicker way to copy to an externall hard drive?
I have the same problem as Sputz up there. It’s a miracle that ubuntu even finally sees the drive, but it won’t mount it and I don’t understand this error.
Why I use Puppy to tuneup XP.
Please note the date I added this to the Puppy Forum.
PostPosted: Sun 29 Jul 2007, 22:47
http://www.murga-linux.com/pup.....hp?t=20312
“”"”"”"”"”"”
Much easier to load and the drives automount.
Much easier and quicker.
Take out the cd after booting, as Puppy runs in memory,
Then burn your data, docs, songs, photos to cd or dvd if
you have no spare drive or dvd.
This has saved many an XP and Vista computer.
//////////////////
There is also seven page doc file zip …
11.1 KB at the end of my post.
The last 2 pages are a clean out guide 4 XP.
Some modification is needed for Vista….
Documents and settings = user.
Puppy How to remove Viruses Whirlpool Revision.zip
Chris.
I have an ACER 5000 laptop running Windows XP. It will not boot up. I get this message: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: Windows\System32\config\system.” I get this after I choose “Last Know Working (or Good) Configuration.” I can’t get anywhere after this.
I started to follow the directions offered here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....s-computer. I made my UBUNTU CD, checked it on a working computer (it’s fine) and inserted it into the ACER. It still won’t boot-up! I tried it off the BIOS screen, but nothing. The laptop does not seem to see the disk.
Any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Geoff
could i use this to do a system restore..one of my friends messed up his computer and it wont boot correctly..i was just wondering if i could use this to get into it and do a system restore
I want to extend so much thanks to you for getting this on the web. Im in Iraq on a deployment and I was F’d. I went to throug the net ops guys to get an ubuntu disc and I saved my Fall out 3 game save. Well I save my other not as important files like bills and photos but mainly got the game save. I would suggest from my current EXP. that sometimes the file browser wont open and that the user might want to shut down and restart if clicking on the drive icon doesnt do anything.
Regards from this dusty shithole
Cop Basrah
Z
Using this method allowed me to retrieve all my daughter’s files. Some were a little tough to locate, and we verified on another computer, but I was able to retrieve everything.
I finally decided to try Ubuntu as a last resort, burned a CD on my Mac (I’m a Mac person) – and started her computer up using an external drive.
My only regret is that I didn’t find this article BEFORE I spent too many hours to count figuring it out on my own. I’m glad you put up the article and hope others find it before, rather than after they pull their hair out.