The 2-day Process Of Recovering Data From a Windows XP Home NTFS Hard Drive

I received the dreaded phone call from my dad a few days back: Windows wouldn't boot. Little did I know, I was in for the big one this time.

I tried my standard tricks. I used the ninja-style [eight commands to repair Windows][eight], which usually fixes it, but this time it didn't fix it. I tried CHKDSK, and I was told that *"The drive has suffered from one or more unrecoverable errors."* Hmmm, that's a new one.

[eight]: http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=313&p=1




2 days later, I finished recovering everything important. For the sake of posterity, here's what to do when all else fails and you don't have a USB drive handy.

Shopping List
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1. A new hard drive with at least twice the capacity of the old drive. (More on the exact size later.)
2. [Acronis Partition Manager for Windows][acronis], or another partition software of your choice. (I've never been a big fan of Partition Magic.)
3. A Ubuntu live CD.

[acronis]: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/partitioning.html
[ubuntu]: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/GetUbuntu/download?action=show&redirect=download

Once you've got those, it's time to get started. Here's the process I used. I tried it several different ways, and this is the only way I could get it to work. But I'm open to more options.

The Process
-----------

1. Back up the data on the failed hard drive. (Ha ha, just kidding.)
2. Open your case, install the new hard drive as master, and move the old busted one to slave.
3. Stick in your XP Home CD, and start the installation.
4. When you get to the part where it asks you where to install Windows, create a new NTFS partition on the new, big hard drive. (That's your only choice.)
5. Finish the rest of the Windows installation.
6. Boot into your minty-fresh Windows and install Acronis (or your partition software). Reboot when it asks you to.
7. This is where it's a bit tricky. Your XP installation will probably be taking around 3.5 GB of hard drive space on your new drive. Hopefully, your new drive capacity minus that 3.5 GB is still at least twice as big as the data you're trying to back up. Here's why:
8. Resize your NTFS partition to create some empty space at the END of the drive. You need to size it so that there is **still more empty space inside your NTFS partition *and* outside your NTFS partition** than the data you're trying to back up. So, for example, if you need to save 30 GB worth of stuff, Make sure that your NTFS partition has at least 30 GB of free space, *and* there's at least 30 GB of unpartitioned space at the end of the drive.
9. Create a partition in the empty space, and format it as **FAT32**.
10. Reboot and insert your Ubuntu live CD (any distro of Linux would probably work though.)
11. Open Disk Manager and find the device names for your FAT32 partition and your broken disk. They should both be along the lines of *hda1* or *hda5* or something like that.
12. If either of the disks are already mounted in the Disk Manager (i.e. they are 'accessible,') unmount them.
12. Open a Terminal, and issue the following commands, replacing "/dev/hda1" with your broken NTFS drive:
sudo mkdir /media/baddrive
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222
13. While you're in there, issue the following commands, replacing /dev/hda2 with your FAT32 partition:
sudo mkdir /media/tempdrive
sudo mount /dev/hda2 /media/windows/ -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000
(those mount commands were found at ubuntuguide.org.)
14. Now, using the Ubuntu file manager, copy the files from the broken drive to the temporary drive.
15. Remove the Ubuntu CD and reboot.
16. Once you're back in Windows, move the data from the temporary FAT32 partition to the XP Home NTFS partition.
17. When that's done, load Acronis Partition Manager. I prefer to do the next part in two separate steps:
18. Delete the FAT32 partition and reboot.
19. Expand the XP Home NTFS partition into the empty space. Reboot again.

You should have all of your data back now. I strongly suggest that you pull the bad drive out and bash it with a hammer. At least that's what I wanted to do.