Help! Major Memory Installation Issue

Rhino wrote:

I haven't updated this thread in a couple of days so I thought I'd
drop in with some news.

I've used that Ubuntu disk in LiveCD mode and made some major headway
with it. As I'd hoped, booting from the Ubuntu CD brought me to a menu
offering to let me install it or just pretend that Linux was installed;
I chose the latter and was rewarded with full access to my F: and G:
drives. I've been working on copying as much of the data as possible
to my D: drive. It's clearly not all going to fit. I've done some
house-cleaning and gotten rid of data that I really don't think I'll
need again. It still won't fit into the space that I have. I'll save
the most important stuff on the D:, on DVD-RWs and on my laptop and
see how important the remaining data is; with a bit of luck, it will
be things that I can live without. Otherwise, I may be heading to the
store for another drive, the smallest I can get away with.

I've also discovered that I have sound in Ubuntu! I've tried playing some
videos in Ubuntu and I can hear them just fine. No more lip-reading to make
out what's going on ;-) So we know the board is okay with respect to sound;
it's just the drivers that aren't letting Windows access the audio.

I still haven't seen hide nor hair of my E: drive, the remaining partition
of the 3 TB drive. But I haven't tried all of your suggestions yet; I'll
get
to that after I've salvaged as much of the F: and G: drives as I can.
Those are the most critical files in any case.


By the way, I should clarify that I have not cleared off the C: drive
yet or even slipstreamed XP and SP3. I'm using the Ubuntu disk to do as
much as I can before I mess with Windows.

I'll update further when I have more news. Thanks for all your help so
far Paul! There's still lots to do but there is positive stuff happening
and I'm making real headway toward a full resolution.


Some good news. I found a way to do it from Linux, without
copying anything. So this will give you access to the top
files, instantly.

It turns out, the mount command accepts an offset, so you
can basically manually step the mounter out to that partition
way up in 3TB country.

Let's say the 3TB disk is /dev/sdc (that's where it is right now,
because my disk setup is slightly different than before).

I figure out which is which, by doing

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc
p --- print parameters for the disk
q --- quit without changing anything

The 3TB disk, will have some partitions with fairly large LBA values.
And /dev/sdc matches the description.

Once I've found the disk (sda, sdb, sdc, etc), I use hexdump
to inspect for an NTFS header. This assumes the Acronis Extended
Capacity Manager portion above 3TB, has the one partition. I'm
just going from memory here, as to what this number represents.
This number should also work for you, but verify with the "hexdump"
command. I've included a couple lines, of the hexdump output.

Now, here, 0x20000140000 = 2.2TB + 262144 bytes gap + Acronis 1MB offset

sudo hexdump -C -s 0x20000140000 -n 512 /dev/sdc
20000140000 eb 52 90 4e 54 46 53 20 20 20 20 00 02 08 00 00 |.R.NTFS .....|
20000140010 00 00 00 00 00 f8 00 00 3f 00 ff 00 00 08 00 00 |........?.......|

What I'm looking for there, is evidence I've found the beginning of the file
system, just above 2.2TB. And seeing the letters NTFS like that, in the
result, proves I'm in the right place.

I convert the hex number to decimal, and verify I get the same result

sudo hexdump -C -s 2199024566272 -n 512 /dev/sdc

OK, now make an empty directory. This is a mount point, and the
file system will mount over top of this and your files will be
found there. Since my Windows partition was called POKEY, that's
what I called it in Linux too. (Normally, the Linux automounter
would figure out the label on its own, but we're doing this
the old-fashioned manual way.)

sudo mkdir /media/POKEY

And this is the command I learned tonight. Since I have proof the
sector at 2199024566272 is the beginning of the top-most partition,
I attempt to mount it. If this isn't the beginning of the partition,
I'll get a snotty error message for my trouble, and nothing will mount.
I tried this, and it works. I can see the top partition now!

sudo mount -t ntfs -o offset=2199024566272 /dev/sdc /media/POKEY

If you want to mount the partition read-only, so nothing bad can
happen to the top partition, that would look like this. You
cannot delete files in /media/POKEY, if you run it this way.

sudo mount -t ntfs -o ro,offset=2199024566272 /dev/sdc /media/POKEY

When you're finished copying files off it, this unmounts it.

sudo umount /media/POKEY

You can remove the now-empty mount point as well, but since
you're using a Linux LiveCD, it disappears as soon as you
shutdown. I need to remove the directory here, because my
copy of Ubuntu is running from a USB stick (persistent
file method).

Have fun,
Paul