Data Recovery on a Laptop

I am trying to recover data from HP laptop that is running Windows but does not start up anymore. I am able to start it up with Knoppix.

$ fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xf74225fc

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1              63      2047      1985 992.5K 42 SFS
/dev/sda2  *         2048    409599    407552   199M 42 SFS
/dev/sda3          409600 895070207 894660608 426.6G 42 SFS
/dev/sda4       895070208 976764927  81694720    39G 42 SFS

Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

Mounting of /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 works but it seems like they do not correspond to the big C: Partition.

Mouting /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 fails. To be expected?

$ mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail or so.
$ mount -o ro /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error

       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail or so.
$ dmesg | tail
[ 4589.100349] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 4589.100353] ata1.00: error: { UNC }
[ 4589.103188] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 4589.103227] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#9 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[ 4589.103237] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#9 Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor] 
[ 4589.103246] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#9 Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
[ 4589.103255] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#9 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 06 40 80 00 00 08 00
[ 4589.103262] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 409728
[ 4589.103270] Buffer I/O error on dev sda2, logical block 16, async page read
[ 4589.103316] ata1: EH complete
...

This looks like an HP Recovery Partition:

/mnt/sda4$ ls
boot     Desktop.ini    hp            HP_WSD.dat  recovery      RM_Reserve
bootmgr  FactoryUpdate  HPSF_Rep.txt  preload     $RECYCLE.BIN  System Volume Information

So you would expect sda3 to correspond to the big C: partion (windows folder, user folder). But that doesn not seeem to be the case:

/mnt/sda3$ ls
bci2k  bci data  Data  EEG BCI  $RECYCLE.BIN  System Volume Information

Any ideas?

Joachim

Posted 2016-03-21T08:38:04.433

Reputation: 141

Might be a good idea to remove the hard drive, mount it on a known good system, and image it with a rescue centric imaging software like gddrescue - this may take a while but its handy on damage disks. Off hand, those error messages look like its worth checking the smart status of the disk as well – Journeyman Geek – 2016-03-21T08:57:16.573

What is smartctl saying about the drive, is it in decent shape, or is the error rate high? /dev/sda3 is your main Windows partition but it's trashed. sda1 is probably the UEFI partition and sda2 is the MSR (MicroSoft Reserve or Windows boot partition). If you need to recover data, remove the device and use ddrescue in another machine, if not, try a reinstall from the recovery environment. – acejavelin – 2016-03-21T10:44:51.180

Data Recovery on a Laptop

No answers