hi
i have an external hard disk, which has my life on it. at a friends house, using the drive on MS win xp, the xp machine crashed…
i unplugged the drive, and got it home. now it refuses to mount on my linux systems…fedora and opensuse…saying that the log file shows there was a shutdown error.
now my question is this:
is it safe to force mount my drive on my system? will there be any problems? is it healthy to do so?
or should i go to the nearest win xp machine…which is quit far from me… … and plug in my drive, and then safely remove it from there? will that work?
which of the two is safer/ more preferable option? as i said, my life depends on this drive…i mean my college, my job, my data. i do not want to risk it.
what do you people suggest?
thanks is advance. any help is greatly appreciated.
I’ve been in the same fix and offer the following suggestions:
go to an XP machine and “safely remove” the drive. That might solve the problem. I skipped this step and tried force mounting. I found myself in Deep Doo Doo. Not worth it.
You may end up having to run chkdsk anyhow, since the drive is long do it while your there. Can’t hurt, and your friend who owns the XP PC can probably talk you through it, It’s very easy.
Never, ever, ever rely on an external drive (or any single drive for that matter) to store the sole copy of anything critical!!! Been there done that, it sucked when I lost it ALL.
A quick Google search will reveal literally thousands of cases of folks who’ve had external drives fail in such a way that he data was irretrievable. (I’m one of them.) I now use external drives for storage only if I have two identical drives and can regular back one up to the other. (defacto mirroring)
I had to do a force mount on my internal XP hard disk (from a LiveCD) because it would BSOD and I could hear it spin down the hard drive while I read the message it leaves behind.
It worked find, and allowed me to access it via the LiveCD so I could copy all of the personal files (c:\documenst and settings*) onto my server.
It did give me a great reason why my wife had to use Linux for a while, and I’ve just never quite gotten around to fixing it ;). So far it does everything she needs so as long as it isn’t needed …
