Help with cripped hard drive

December 15, 2006 3:37 PM

How can I get my crippled computer to communicate with the outside world?

Short story is the laptop hard drive gave out last night, and the computer is bootable but very very slow, and due to the interminable millions of files that Windows tries to boot up with, I eventally get a bluescreen trying to boot Windows. Even in safe mode.

I've reverted to MS-DOS boot disks and can see the hard drive, but I have no way of offloading the drive contents to anything!

1. Even if I remove the laptop hard drive, I have no way of connecting it to my other computers. This hard drive looks like it uses some sort of proprietary connector.

2. I tried using a USB drive, but none of the usbaspi.sys tricks work in getting the computer to recognize these drives. This model (Dell M50) isn't even capable of booting from USB!

Is there any way to get a very barebones network layer going under MS-DOS so I can send files to my server or another computer? The only thing I can seem to do at this point is use FSPAN and FJOIN to copy files across floppy discs... which I'm about to do. Ugh!

posted by stam_broker to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Try booting off knoppix, mount the hard drive, and copy the files off with ftp or scp.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 3:46 PM on December 15, 2006

The hard drive probably doesn't use a proprietary connector. The 2.5" (laptop) hard drive IDE connector, though, is different than the 3.5" (desktop) hard drive one. So, if you want to pull the drive, you'll need one of these (or a similar cable, anyway).

Alternately, there are single-floppy Linux distributions that'll let you send files to an ftp server. If the hard drive is NTFS, though, you might run into problems reading it.

(And, of course, these are not the only two solutions.)
posted by box at 3:46 PM on December 15, 2006

Try booting off knoppix, mount the hard drive,

The hard drive is unmountable... as I mentioned the hard drive can't withstand a slew of read/writes. I'm having good luck getting individual files off, though.
posted by stam_broker at 3:55 PM on December 15, 2006

Or if you mean just read the hard drive through some sort of mount (rather than try to boot a complete Unix installation on it), I suppose that's not so bad.
posted by stam_broker at 3:56 PM on December 15, 2006

If you can see the hard drive from DOS, you've mounted the hard drive. (On preview, I see you've realized this.) Knoppix is a good solution. Alternatively, if you are uncomfortable with Linux and you have a Windows install CD available, you can use it to build a Bart-PE disc with the proper network/USB drivers and whatnot to save the data.
posted by Partial Law at 3:58 PM on December 15, 2006

May I ask quickly: when I boot from Knoppix, will it recognize my network configuration right away, or will I have to configure something before I waltz into FTP?
posted by stam_broker at 4:50 PM on December 15, 2006

Linux live CD's like Knoppix (or my personal favourite, the Trinity Rescue Kit) don't touch the hard disk. In fact, if your machine has at least 256MB of RAM, Trinity Rescue Kit can be told to copy all its working files into RAM on boot and eject the CD, so you end up with a working Linux environment with none of your drives tied up at all.

The current version of TRK can make the hard drives of any machine it boots on accessible as Windows shares, and is a much smaller download than Knoppix.

If you want to maximize your chances of recovering stuff from a failing hard disk, though, I recommend using ddrescue (included in the latest TRK) to make a block-by-block copy of the entire drive into an image file on another drive, perhaps a USB drive (even though your BIOS won't boot from USB, there's every chance that Linux will recognize a connected USB drive just fine).

Post back here if you need more help with any of this. Data loss is a pain.
posted by flabdablet at 5:09 PM on December 15, 2006

On lack of preview: just about any modern Linux live CD will auto-detect network and USB storage hardware without you having to do anything clever. If there's a DHCP server somewhere on your network, you'll also get useable IP address and DNS settings without needing configuration.

Knoppix is a 700MB download; TRK is about 150MB IIRC.
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 PM on December 15, 2006

Actually I'm just now finding that Knoppix DOES touch the hard drive... in fact it messes with it pretty severely:
Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...
posted by stam_broker at 6:03 PM on December 15, 2006

It's probably not messing with it as much as you fear; it will be reading it to find out what partitions exist so that it knows how to mount the filesystems on those partitions. The /etc/fstab file it's creating will be in RAM, not on any of your disk partitions.

TRK doesn't touch the hard disk at all during bootup. It has a mountallfs script you can use to examine partitions and mount their filesystems, but you can also mount partitions individually just using the mount command if you prefer. Not sure what it does if you select the Samba sharing option at bootup time - I haven't used that feature yet.
posted by flabdablet at 6:22 PM on December 15, 2006

I'm glad to report success. Knoppix was able to recognize my USB thumb drive. All I had to do was enable write mode on that volume. I'm glad I backed up my drive a few weeks ago... there was only small bits and pieces to rescue.

I swear by Knoppix now. The irony of having to use a Linux tool to rescue me from a relatively simple Windows problem just blows my mind. The instructions I found for using usbaspi.sys, DUSE, dat.exe, and all that MS-DOS stuff didn't work worth a damn. Knoppix saved the day.
posted by stam_broker at 11:10 PM on December 15, 2006

Where is the irony? I've been using Linux to rescue me from a relatively simple Windows problem for some while now :-)
posted by flabdablet at 12:23 AM on December 17, 2006