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Hi

Hoping someone can help me out here, as I've now reached a brick wall in my attempts to revive my computer.

I've ecountered the blue screen ntfs.sys 0x0024 error, unable to start in safe mode use system restore or use command prompt, do a repair installation or basically do anything with Windows XP. Windows does not even to be able to detect the hard drive anymore, even in the BIOS.

I'm now trying to use Knoppix (Knoppix is live Linux that boots from a CD for anyone who does n't know) to do the repair. I've managed to load Knoppix onto the computer and I can now, to much relief see all my files and folders. I've done run cfdisk and found the NTFS to be on sda2 and I've then typed ntfsfix /dev/sda2
I then get the error message:

Mountine volume... Error opening partition device: Device or resource busy.
Failed to startup volume: Device or resource busy
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...Error opening partition device: Device or resource busy
FAILED
Failed to startup volume: Device or resource busy
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk

This is the point where I now stuck ! Can I run chkdsk in Knoppix ?

Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but when I mount the disk I get the message, WARNING: Dirty volume mount was forced by the "force" mount option + the name of the hard disk on the desktop appears as, pdc_bdiieehfaj2, not sure if this is correct ?

My computer uses an Athlon 64 and has a SATA Hard drive and Windows XP.

I'm not sure why the ntfs error occured. Can only think that it me be something to do with a windows update I installed or that
the hard drive is virtually full up ?

Any help would be much appreciated, hope the above makes sense to someone.

Cheers

I would guess your hard drive is physically bad. You should test it with a manufacturer-provided diagnostics utility to be sure.

Also, you should try to grab your precious data off the drive first before trying any repair utilities.

Under {U,L}inux, the command for repair is fsck

see the online man(8) page

DO NOT install anything (Linux or Windows) until all errors (fsck / chkdsk) have
been corrected.

You may wish to offload important files from your windows system asap
see this post

Hi Guys

Thanks for your replies. Unfortunately, all my files which I could see under My Documents have now mysteriously vanished (the folder is there, but it is now completely empty !) just as I was about to transfer them to an external Hard Drive. Everything else on the hard drive is still visible !

Any ideas what could have happened to do this and how I make retrive them again ? Is there anything I can do to get them back, so I can transfer them ? I can't believe they can have all simply gone, over 100 GB !

Is there any way using Knoppix to make an exact copy of the hard drive onto my external hard drive, so that I can play around with the data a bit more without worrying about making things worse ? Is there anything such as Testdisk that I can in Knoppix which will not make the problem any worse ?

Thanks again for your help.

Use the dd command. dd_rescue may a better idea if the hard drive has bad sectors.

If you are using TestDisk 6.8 or later, in the Advanced menu, select the NTFS partition, choose Boot and List. Sometimes it can access files even if the filesystem is a "little" damaged. RepairMFT can repair the MFT using the MFT mirror, it will ask you confirmation before changing anything. If you have done a backup with dd or GNU ddrescue, it's even better.

Christophe