OT - Help requested in rescuing data from a corrupted Widows disk

[Chris B]

Any help would be appreciated with regard to the following.

I am trying to help a friend of mine who tried to update his Win7 laptop to Win 10 on battery. As you might have guessed the battery went flat before completion and the m/c now wont boot at all from its internal hard disk.

And he didn't have his data backed up since about 4 moths ago.

I have downloaded a W10 ISO disk, booted from CD and tried all of the "repair" options - they proceed for about an hour and then say "windows was unable to repair the installation".

A clean install looks like it might work to get the machine going again but I suspect that this will loose all of his data.

A CD boot into Linux mint allows me to see all of the data and I have a USB thumb drive formatted in FAT32 and I appear to be able to copy all of his data files onto this thumb drive, using the Linux Live CD boot.

However when I take the thumb drive back to a windows machine, having written to it in Linux mint, the windows machine is unable to read it - the only option given is disc cannot be read do you want to format it.

So my question is "Is it possible to read with Windows, a disk which has been written to in Linux? If so how?"

Thanks in anticipation for any help.

(otherwise I guess its take the HD out of the laptop and mount it as an extra disk into one of my desktop machines)

[T i m]

Yes. ;-)

It should 'just work', as long as the file system used on the pen drive is one readable by Windows.

So, that would be FAT, Fat32, NTFS etc.

That's another way but what you did the first time should still work (subject to the above proviso etc).

Cheers, T i m

[tabbypurr]

Of course. format the flash drive as FAT16 / VFAT, preferably using windows since it's less capable.

yup, with an adaptor

NT

[Chris B]

Thanks, I'll just try with a different thumb drive and if that doesn't work revert to plan B.

[T i m]

Well, it shouldn't need a 'different' thumb drive, just make sure the one you are using is formatted compatibly. Do you have a spare Windows PC you could format the stick with Chris?

You could equally do it in Linux but if you do it in a Windows machine you can check *it* can read it at the same time.

Cheers, T i m

[Cursitor Doom]

If the thumb drive has been formatted as FAT32, then there should be no problem. I would try reading it from a different Windows machine and see if that recognises it.

[Bill]

In message , Chris B writes

I don't know whether this will be any help or not, but I had a similar situation with a friend's Windows 7 machine that wouldn't boot and wouldn't "repair". It had a W8 recovery partition and the activation code matched that. I got an external enclosure and put the HD in that. I also provided an external large backup HD and using a Mint CD copied an image of the faulty HD onto that. I then put the faulty HD to one side in case I broke things even more.

I bought her a new HD, installed a fresh W7 without activating it.

I then used Mint to look at the image and the new HD and gradually started to replace parts of the new installation by the equivalent parts of the image.At each stage where things still worked, I took a fresh image of the working HD. ( I might have installed Macrium on the new HD and used that for the image files, I can't remember).

Gradually the installation came better. There were about 3 false starts where I returned the machine in triumph, only to be told "There's just one thing...". Eventually the machine worked well enough for her to be happy, and as far as I know the only thing that we couldn't get going and activated was her Quickbooks with her personal accounts.

My payment for the literally weeks of work was that I kept her old HD for a month then it became my property. I think I kept it to one side for 3 months after she was happy and last week I've just installed it in a laptop of mine.

It was very stressful and I've fairly successfully tried to forget all about it

[Cursitor Doom]

I should also say the first thing you should have done is image his busted installation with your Linux live CD:

# dd if=/dev/sda1 conv=sync,noerror bs=4096 | gzip -c > /destpath/ imagename.img.gz

Obviously substitute the real device name in his case for the 'destpath' bit.

[Chris B]

On 19/01/2016 20:40, T i m wrote: work revert to plan B.

Well before I started I made sure that the thumb drive was empty by formatting it in FAT 32 on the W10 machine. I copied one file from Windows onto it and them moved it to the laptop.

Linux was able to read and open this one file and copy all of his photos to the thumb drive.

Transfer back to Windows and the disk mounts with a drive letter but says something like "disk file system not recognised you will have to format the drive before you can use it".

[Cursitor Doom]

You could also try reading it on an WinXP machine if you know someone still using it. I'm just wondering if M$ has found some other/another way to discriminate against Linux and have implemented it in Win10...

[T i m]

I wonder if it just got corrupted somehow? Did you eject the thumdrive from Linux before physically removing it (not that it generally causes any issues if you aren't too quick after writing to it).

Did you say if you had read it again under Linux?

Cheers, T i m

[tabbypurr]

That ought to work fine of course. Maybe try formatting on linux, try NTFS, or go plan B & put the HDD onto another machine to copy.

NT

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Chris B escribió:

Try running TestDisk on it

to see what it finds. It won't write anything back to the disk unless you explicitly tell it to.

Have to say I'm very surprised that just putting a disk in Linux is enough to screw it up for Windows. But then, who know hat M$ has done in Win10? Agreed you could try an earlier version of Windows.

[Chris Bartram]

I've fixed a similar scenario for a friend. What I did was boot a Linux live CD, find the data and move it to a folder (called "backup", but whatever), delete c:\windows and the two "program files" folders (two if it's 64 bit, one for 32 bit), and rename c:\users to c:\users.old, just in case there's anything still there. Then boot the Windows ISO, and do a re-install without formatting the drive. Copy the data back when it finishes. Job done. If you can't find the data, look inside any c:\windows.old\users folder that the repair attempt has created. That have me a shock...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Mmm. USB formatted in FAT32. So it SHOULD be windows compatible - unless you used the wrong copy command.

How DID you copy the data?

How odd. Ive always said windows was fundamentally broken..

Of course, just stick it in the slot.

As long as the disk is formatted as FAT 32 it should be OK. The real question is why it isn't, in this case.

[Brian Gaff]

[Brian Gaff]

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Brian Gaff escribió:

I was wondering the same thing. Linux caches disk operations very aggressively, so it's important to use "sync ; sync ; eject /dev/sdX" to make sure cache is flushed before yanking the stick. Or use "Eject" from the icon on the desktop.

[Mike Tomlinson]

Brain, download and run TestDisk from

This will show you what it can get from the disc. If it offers to fix the partition table, let it, then do a file scan. If the list looks sane, let it write changes, then try using the disc as normal. Or you can recover individual files from within TestDisk.

It's a godsend, has saved my bacon more than once.

En el artículo , Brian Gaff escribió:

[Jonno]

Chris B scribbled

Try formatting the thumb drive with exFat and transferring the files