Access a Damaged Drive with Knoppix Linux

A few months ago, I wandered into my computer room in search of something (I can’t remember what it was since I was not getting much sleep at the time due to my newborn daughter) and I heard the dreaded clicking noise emanating from my trusty P.C. which though a little long in the tooth, had lasted my since college (6 years, wow!) with only a RAM upgrade and a new hard drive. The previous time I had hard drive problems I was able to buy a new drive, use the old one as a secondary drive (slave), and still get at my data. This was my initial hope. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

As I was having these problems, I wrote about it on my other blog. That’s where Mike suggested I try booting Linux directly from a CD. Desperate to try anything, I started researching my options and came across Knoppix Linux.

My experience with Knoppix was a pretty good one. There really isn’t much to using it. First of all, you need to download the ISO Image file from one of the mirror sites. This is, of course, assuming you have access to a high speed Internet connection somewhere (at work, or in a public place somewhere?). Once the .iso file is downloaded, burn the image to a CD with your favorite burning software (the Knoppix Downloading FAQ has some information on how to do this, if you don’t know how).

Now that you have your disk, the next step is to put the disk in the computer with the messed up hard drive and turn it on. Enter your computer’s bios settings (varies from computer to computer) and set the computer to boot from the CD drive. Exit setup and you computer should start booting Knoppix.

The computer may take some time to boot from CD. Mine did (note my CD-ROM was over 6 years old). I doubt it would ever load as fast as it could from the hard drive. This isn’t a big deal, but is something to consider if you are in a hurry or not a patient person.

The moment of truth comes once Knoppix is loaded. Hopefully it was able to detect your hard drive and your hard drive wasn’t too damaged. Unfortunately, mine physically wasn’t able to run long enough for Knoppix to detect it. The disk would spin, the clicking would start, and then the disk would fail. If Knoppix is able to detect your drive I suggest you get your data off of it as fast as possible. You never know how much time you have left on the defective drive. Hopefully you have a nice sized USB drive handy you can copy data to.

My damaged drive sits on my desk in my computer room, waiting for the time when I have enough money to have someone professionally retrieve the data (probably never). I even tried the freezer method which did nothing but make the drive cold.

I am interested in success stories with Knoppix, so if you have been able to recover data using this method please let me know in the comments.