Persiflage and Piffle

So here´s the bummer; I got an error message on my machine yesterday warning me that a file was corrupt. ¨Excellent¨ I thought; no, not excellent that a file´s corrupt - excellent that I now know and can do something about it. Since the O/S was Windows XP, I nipped into the event log and saw lots of NTFS errors… oh-no… bad sectors. So foolishly I did what a lot of people would do - I ran chkdsk. Although not my boot partition, the drive was in use by a number of services I run and so chkdsk needed to perform a boot time check - so I foolishly let it.

So here I am, writing this blog entry from Ubuntu… why? Because chkdsk ´fixed´ my disk is such a way that Windows can no longer read it - at all!

I threw an Ubuntu installation disk into my DVD drive (burned a few weeks earlier from a downloaded ISO image) and let it start up a running Ubuntu installation. So that´s the first nice thing about Linux; a lot of the distributions let to ´try before you buy´ … well ok, ´try before you install´ actually.

It auto-mounted my external USB drive but not my other hard drives. The faulty partition is on a SATA disk, but even so, a quick ¨mount /dev/sda6 /media/ddrive¨ and my old supposedly inaccessible D: appeared. So thanks to Ubuntu I have now copied off the last few bits of information that I´d forgotten to backup (with only the occasional ¨Cannot stat: Input/output error¨ to slow me down )

If only Windows were able to read its own partition as easily!