HDD Recovery and Linux Dual-Boot Question

[Wintermute]

Woke up today to find my 250Gb HDD had cocked up on me. Windows reads the drive as empty and unformatted but hooking it up to the other Desktop and running TestDisk confirms the files are all still there.

If I try to access the Drive or its partitions through explorer I get an error stating it's either unformatted (Games/MP3 partition) or corrupt (Windows partition).

I'm currently copying everything I can over to an external using TestDisk but it's a slow (catatonic) process and the MP3 and Torrent archives are going to take days at best.

My Docs/Settings folder is under 2Gb and took about 2 Hours and my second partition has about 80Gb of data I want to backup.

Anyone with data recovery experience got any recommendations on programs that may be a bit faster in copying the data across?


Secondly, I'm likely going to reformat the drive seeing how I've been meaning to anyway so I figure I may also try a Linux Dual-Boot to use for when I'm not playing the vijeo games.

Having never used or tried Linux are there any recommendations on which version to use?

How big a partition should I look at for Linux to run smoothly?

Likewise, are there any recommended sites for Linux drivers?

EDIT: HDD recovered, can ignore that bit.

[Kriz]

I'd run Spinrite on the drive to see if the issue is some badly placed bad sectors which may be fixable. SR has a pretty good track record in what sounds like your case.

If you are looking for data recovery though, R-studio is pretty solid. But it sounds like bad sectors to me. Best of luck.

[Wintermute]

I'd run Spinrite on the drive to see if the issue is some badly placed bad sectors which may be fixable. SR has a pretty good track record in what sounds like your case.

If you are looking for data recovery though, R-studio is pretty solid. But it sounds like bad sectors to me. Best of luck.

Yep, was a few bad sectors, thankfully TestDisk was able to re-write the Boot sector/partitions and got it to work under Windows Explorer again. CHKDSK on startup seems to have sorted the rest out.

Going to give Spinrite a go too.

[Julian]

I'm currently also in the process of trying to recover files from an old/dead hdd, so if you got your stuff working please do share =(

[virusiidx]

Having never used or tried Linux are there any recommendations on which version to use?

How big a partition should I look at for Linux to run smoothly?

Likewise, are there any recommended sites for Linux drivers?

Definitely start off with Ubuntu. It's the most popular, largest community supported and stable linux distro out there. They release a new version every 6 months with 9.04 being the latest one which was just released a little over a week ago or so.

You can download it here: Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu

You don't need to install it at first, you can just burn the ISO on to CD and run it as a "Live" disc first, which runs the OS off the CD without installing it. It will be a little slow, but it's good to test it out to see if you like. Then you can just install it into the HDD from the desktop icon. You can also just flash the ISO onto a usb drive to do the same thing: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...n/FromImgFiles

and bookmarks these links if you're planning on using it, they have LOTS of info.

https://help.ubuntu.com/
Ubuntu Forums
https://help.ubuntu.com/community

The OS shouldn't take up too much space, so 20 or 40 gigs of a partition is just fine if you're just going to play around with it. Anymore than that is up to you if you're gonna put a lot of media on it.

As for the drivers, hopefully the OS detects all the hardware off the bat and shouldn't be much of a problem. It's mainly the nvidia or ATI propriety drivers you gotta look out for.

Try not to think Windows when messing around with it, it has a lot of differences than Windows which usually ends up discouraging people from using it. I can go into this with detail, but it would be best to check out the beginner forums on ubuntuforums.org. But it's a great OS. Anyways, good luck and post if you have any questions.

[Senoska]

I had installed Ubuntu but had switched to Xubuntu as the large majority of gnome-related shit sucks (IE: No dual screen background support and an increasingly closed sourced project.) To get Xubuntu all you gotta do is go to the Synaptic Install manager and type Xubuntu and install the shit you see. Log out and click "Choose session" and click XFCE.

Gaurentee you'll like what you have 150x more than gnome..

Stay away from KDE though...

As someone had mentioned linux pretty much works out of the box with most hardware. Drivers, except for a few things, are totally irrelevent (which is why linux is my baby <3)

[Dench]

Having never used or tried Linux are there any recommendations on which version to use?

How big a partition should I look at for Linux to run smoothly?

Likewise, are there any recommended sites for Linux drivers?

EDIT: HDD recovered, can ignore that bit.

I switched to Ubuntu about 3 months ago and I have had a great experience for the most part. I have an ATI Radeon card and they seem to have some driver issues that haven't been worked out yet.

Using grub, I had a dual-boot setup with Vista and Linux and it was very convenient and easy to set up. I made my Linux partition about 30gigs which was way more than I even touched after installation of additional programs.

The issues I had with my ATI card were a pain in the ass, however.. simple things that I took for granted like embedded video didn't seem to function properly (not always).

[virusiidx]

I had installed Ubuntu but had switched to Xubuntu as the large majority of gnome-related shit sucks (IE: No dual screen background support and an increasingly closed sourced project.)

Stay away from KDE though...

I don't mean to nitpick or anything. But just curious why you prefer xfce over gnome? They are both pretty similar. I understand xfce is more light-weight and faster, but unless you're on an old PC, gnome runs pretty quick and can be configured to look very nice. gnome, kde and xfce run on the same core, they are basically wrappers. Like comparing apples and oranges.

Not sure what you mean by no dual screen background support, you mean multi-desktop? You can add that to your panel unless you're talking about something else, then I dunno.

Also, Gnome is open-source, just like all the included software pre-installed. One great thing about linux is how 'almost' everything is open-source.

Again, not trying to nitpick Just curious on the DE part, maybe there's something I'm missing.

I've been wanting to switch over to linux completely, but I still need windows for some stuff. I've used Redhat/Fedora on my main PC and server for about 8 years. Now I just use fedora as the server OS (since I've just been comfortable with redhat's distro for server apps) and Ubuntu as the main PC. Main laptop has win7 still, but tempted to switch over completely, just can't yet.