Hello,

Currently I've a Dell Notebook running on Windows 2000. It crashes and every time I start the machine, it states "Disk Error". May I know what's the problem? How to save this machine? If it's not possible to save it, can anyone please kindly direct me the appropriate way to retrieve my data in the machine. Data in the machine is very important. Hope to receive a reply soon.

Thank you.

P/S: This is the first time I'm asking a computer hardware problem. Let me know if I missed out something.

How about Knoppix? This is a perfect thing for this, if there is any data that can be recovered on the disk. At least you can check it with this. I have done a mini-review on Knoppix here. It is really easy to use even if you don't have a good understanding of Unix, because it will boot up to a windowed environment with your hard drive mounted as read-only. That way you can read off of it and hopefully put the data on a zip or even burn a CD if you have a burner.

HTH

Thanks for the solution. I'm trying to use it now. I'll get back here to let everyone know about the result.

I'm currently downloading the file. However, there are 3 files. Do I download 3 of the files and burn to the CD?

The 3 files which I mentioned includes:-

KNOPPIX_V3.3-2004-02-16-EN.iso
KNOPPIX_V3.3-2004-02-16-EN.iso.md5
KNOPPIX_V3.3-2004-02-16-EN.iso.md5.asc

Sorry, the only one that you need to burn to the CD is the .iso (the big one!). The other is a checksum file, which you can use to verify your download, but is not necessary.

Hi,

I burned the CD and managed to boot the laptop. However, it hangs at:-

Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...

So what do I do now? By the way, I did a mistake. My laptop isn't a Dell but Toshiba. Sorry. I checked other forums as well and some of the Toshiba users have this problem but no solution to it.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

I suspect that you have a physical error on your hard drive or your controller. If other people are having this problem, I would try to get a hold of Toshiba ASAP. If this is a controller malfunction that is happening on these laptops, you should be able to get Toshiba to replace and hopefully have the data on your harddrive. If this is a physical hard drive error, it could be a lot worse. If the data that you have is really valuable, you may want to look for a place that can try to extract the data for you if it is even possible.

I think for the time being, I would see what you can figure out from Toshiba. Also, it would probably be best not to boot this laptop up.

Sorry, I was hoping that your error was stemming from a O/S or corrupted file system. This appears to be an actual physical defect which prevents this drive from even being mounted.

Hi,

I managed to boot the system using Knoppix V3.2 after a few attempts of restarting. I managed to get into the KDE environment.

However, when I try to click on Hard Disk Partition [hda1], it displays an error.

---- begin of error message -----
Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad
superblock on /dev/hda1,

or too many mounted file systems
---- end of error message -----

May I know what should I do next? Thanks.

The highlighted one is the cause of your error I would suspect. Knoppix is really good at identifying fs types.

If you want you can try to mount it at the command line. Win 2000 can only run on one of two file systems, so if you want you can try these at the super-user command prompt. (My tutorial explains how to get there).
for an ntfs file system or:
for a fat file system.

I don't think that these will work unfortunately. I think either your hard drive controller has physical errors or your disk itself has physical errors. Have you tried to contact Toshiba about this? If it is happening to a lot of people there may be a hardware defect somewhere.

Yup... it didn't work although I tried the command. I contacted Toshiba and I am still waiting for their response. Although many Toshiba users face this problem, however, certain users do not have.

If the hard drive controller has physical errors or the disk itself has physical errors, does it mean there is no way to recover the hard disk's data?

By the way, when Knoppix is booting up to autoconfiguring devices, I saw this:-
Autoconfiguring devices modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-2