Sep 06

Windows Recovery With Linux

Geek Stuff Add comments

This post is more for my own use, though other geeks may also find it handy. I recently had to do a hard restart of my work-issued Windows laptop. On reboot, Windows 2000 complained it couldn’t find \winnt\system or some such important file. Doh!

Using an Ubuntu Desktop CD, I was able to get the files transfered over to a substitute laptop before the sickly laptop went off for repair. Here are the steps I went through:

  1. Bootup from the CD
  2. Mounted the NTFS volumes as read-only for all users (this assumes that /dev/hda1 is the location of Windows partition; see “How to mount/unmount Windows partitions (NTFS) manually, and allow all users to read only”):

    sudo mkdir /media/c
    sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/c -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222
  3. This step is optional if you are not behind a proxy. Setup apt-get to work through an authenticated proxy by adding the following to /etc/apt/apt.conf:

    Acquire::http::Proxy "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@PROXY.URL.COM:PORT";
  4. Installed vsftpd

    sudo apt-get install vsftpd
  5. Configured vsftpd to allow local users by enabling the following lines in /etc/vsftpd.conf:

    local_enable=YES
  6. Restart vsftpd (note: I had to manually kill the already-running vsftd process first; for some reason the restart processes didn’t stop it):

    sudo /etc/init.do/vsftpd restart

Once those steps were complete, I was able to FTP into the sickly laptop (after discovering the IP address via ifconfig) and login as “ubuntu”, no password. Once logged in, I could change directory to /media/c and begin transferring files over to the substitute laptop.

Resources

written by Kyle \\ tags: , , , , ,

  • Jeremy: see the HOWTO Ridiculously easy home file sharing with FTP and Zeroconf for some insight on why I went with FTP.

    SSH might work better if you do have to go through firewalls, but if you're doing this kind of data recovery it's best to have the computers as close to each other on the network as possible (for maximum speed). SSH also adds signifigant overhead with the encryption, which really isn't needed if you've got the two computers connected on their own little LAN.

    Samba's a witch to setup. I'm not even touching that one.
  • A possibly quicker way to do the transfer other than ftp might have been to install the ssh-server package and use ssh's sftp or scp to transfer the files. It's easier to setup and run and if you have to go though any firewalls its a whole lot easer to set up the port forwarding. I use ssh for file transfers almost exclusively now.

    An additional method would be to use the samba file sharing capabilities in UBUNTU and just mount the drive in your destination machine. That might not be as easy to setup in the live CD though so I don't know if it's any better.
  • Eric
    In addition to partition and software issues, this method can sometimes work on drives suffering from a physical hardware problem. Ubuntu Live was able to successfully mount a damaged hard drive for me and read the data where all attempts at using MS OS options had failed. It was extremely slow, but I recovered 27 GB of a client's personal data during an overnight copying session, minus a single MP3 file that didn't make it for some reason.
  • To be clear: I was transferring the files off of the problematic NTFS partition over to a healthy one (on the substitute laptop). The problematic partition was mounted read-only and served as the source for the copy.
  • Chris
    How did you transfer files to the NTFS partition if it was mounted read-only?
blog comments powered by Disqus