May

21

Data Recovery Via Ubuntu Live CD

Posted by admin

May 21, 2007 |

Live CDs are great inventions. Live CDs simply load an operating system that allows you to test drive that OS without installing it on your hard drive. Now, that’s a very nice way to try the OS out, but it can also come in handy when your primary OS goes south. Most people get confused that they could access the hard drive when the OS can’t be loaded. Sometimes data that is crucial for the OS to load has been corrupted, but the drive can still be accessed. Now, one way to get at that data is to physically pull that drive from the computer and put it in another one with a good OS. So, when you boot the working machine, you can see that problematic drive and grab any data you can from it. But what if you don’t want to do that? This is especially true if you are working on a laptop.

My recommendation would be that you go on over to Ubuntu’s website and download that OS. You will need to burn an iso image after you download it. Don’t worry we have you covered. Now, boot up your Ubuntu CD. After it boots, you will need to do some things to access the NTFS partitions that Windows uses. If you are using a FAT partition, you won’t have this issue. But if you have an NTFS partition, we have a little more work.

Now, you need to change the sources list. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. Click on Applications > System Tools > Terminal. This is akin to Windows Command prompt box. Now, at the window, type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list. This will bring up a notepad like document. In there you should see two lines commented out. The directions talk about uncommenting these lines to get to the sources. Simply remove the preceding # at the beginning of the lines. Now, save the document.

Ok, now click on the “Applications” menu again and select “Add/Remove.” It will ask you to load new sources or something. Go ahead and do that.  In there you are going to find either ntfs-3g or ntfs-config.  I forget which one it is.  Once you install that (you can search on those names), you will find a new icon on the Applications > System Tools Menu.

Go ahead and click on the ntfs-3G (or ntfs-config) icon and follow instructions for adding your ntfs drive.  You should now be able to read and write to that volume.  Now, you can simply take anything you want from that drive and copy to another computer on the network - or a thumb drive on the current machine.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Mike on November 12, 2007 2:00 pm

    Thanks for your simple tutorial. I tried a bunch of other tutorials on this same topic that are overly complex and didn’t work for me. This one did the trick!

  2. admin on November 12, 2007 3:02 pm

    Mike, thanx for stopping by. I’m thrilled that this helped you out! Always nice to hear that a little work has helped someone.

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