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

[The Natural Philosopher]

On Mint IIRC the mounted devices are shown in the file browser and a right click and 'unmount', is what you do. That will flush the caches before unmounting.

[T i m]

Well spotted Brian.

Agreed. And re-formatting the drive etc.

My mate in the PC shop often uses a Linux Mint machine to recover data from customer machine hard drives. He removes the drive from their machine (desktop or laptop), drops it into a desktop SATA caddy and copies it to the desktop. Once their he can write it to an optic drive or pen stick to put back on their machine when the new drive is installed.

Cheers, T i m

[Jethro_uk]

rather than faffing around with drives, is there no way to use a network connection ? A LiveCD boot of Mint will provide SMB shares you can access from Windows. Maybe slower, but less hassle.

[Chris B]

I simply highlighted the files I wanted to copy and dragged them to the thumb drive. All with the GUI no command line stuff. I waited till the gui indicated it was complete and did eject/unmount the disk before removal.

Just one thought it was 32 bit Linux and 64 bit windows - I didn't think that would be a problem - is that correct?

Well despite windows saying I would have to format the disk before I could use it, it failed to do a format. (Initially I asked it to do a quick format, when that failed I unticked the "quick format" option and it took several hours before it said "Format operation failed") At someone else suggestion I have tried TestDisk, and this found nothing. This is perhaps not surprising following a failed windows format. Its beginning to look like my drive is toast.

I am beginning to think it may just be a poorly timed and purely co-incidental random failure of my thumb drive. All the advice on here seems to point to, what I did should work. I will have to wait a couple of days until I see him again but will just try the same thing again with another drive and report back.

[Chris B]

That is definitely my plan B

[The Natural Philosopher]

should not be, no.

Mmm,.

I carry around a 1TB USB external spinning rust drive for these emergencies.

[newshound]

You can get for a few pounds on eBay an adaptor which plugs into any IDE or SATA drive and gives you a USB connection; quicker and less fiddle than opening up another machine and normally the first thing I try in cases like this (after what you have already done).