Accessing HDD using Trisquel 6.0
I was using Trisquel to access my acer laptop which had crashed and refused to start while under Windows 7 "control". Trisquel was installed on CD Drive and therefore quite slow but I was managing to backup files to an external hard drive, with the exception of a few files which refused to transfer. To speed things up I opted to install Trisquel properly. Unfortunately it froze during install so I went back to CD running, but now I can't open the HDD to copy much needed files to the external backup. The standard message I get when I select the old HDD is "Unable to mount location".
I'm new to Linux so does anyone know a method of getting into the HDD without the drastic action of reformatting and losing valuable files?
Hello moorland, and before anything: Welcome to this wonderful community :D
I can be wrong but it seems to be an hardware failure. What you can do is this :
1 - Boot Trisquel on the CD
2 - Trisquel Menu > System Settings
3 - Open Disk Utility
4 - In the left side of the Disk Utility window just select your HDD
5 - Look at the right side and see what is the SMART Status (you can also run some tests by pressing the SMART Data button).
If anything is alright with SMART then just do the following :
1 - Open terminal and type : "sudo swapoff -a"
2 - Go back to the Disk Utility and try to Format the HDD entirely (if this what you really want to do and because it is better in order to clean everything)
Note: Use this options with caution, if you need any help please ask.
Hello aliasbody
Thanks for your advice.
Smart Overall Assessment says "Disk has a few bad sectors".
However, 2 quesstions...
1. How do I open terminal and then go back to disk utility (I am new to Linux).
2. I don't want to have to format the HDD until I've salvaged the last few files that are left on there.
Any advice? Thanks
Moorland
Hi again moorland,
Well if you are new to Gnu/Linux it is true that talking already about the terminal can be really bad for the "image". But it is a very important administrator tool and because of this we can't (as administrators) live without it :D - But that's not the point...
To open the terminal you have two options :
1 - CTRL + ALT + T
2 - Trisquel start menu > Accessories > Terminal
If the disk has "few bad sectores" then it means - in very short words - that it is already dying (like a cancer) and the cases where we can really recover those bad sectors are very rare and take a lot of time.
I imagine - because it already happened to me - that the error appearing when you are trying to copy those files is something like "Bad I/O" (or any message on that kind). I am not a specialist on that but I'm pretty sure those files are unrecoverable - Sorry :S.
You can try to recover those bad sectors with one of those methods :
http://www.pcrepairmansblog.com/use-linux-boot-disk-to-repair-windows-ntfs-disk-fault-hard-drive-chkdsk-bad-blocks-sectors/
http://askubuntu.com/questions/146524/recover-files-from-ntfs-drive-with-bad-sectors
But you will probably be out of luck.