failure to mount corrupted drive

[Rashkae]

Steve Reilly wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> 
> trying to recover data for a friend off an ntfs drive.  well, fdisk
> reports it as ntfs anyway.  booted a gparted cd and it reported it as
> unknown.
> 
> mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force
> 
> with this command im getting an error says this doesnt seem to have a
> valid ntfs?  i thought force, meant FORCE, how can i mount this drive to
> get pictures off it?  using 9.04 live cd at the moment...., but have
> tried no less than a dozen others, none have automounted this drive.
> 
>

Force will mount the drive if the file system driver thinks it might
otherwise be a bad idea (ie, if the drive was not unmounted cleanly and
needs a windows fsck equivalent,) but no command switch on earth will
allow the kernel to mount the drive if it can't make sense of what it
sees.  If the open source tools are unable to access this drive, your
only other choice is to try Windows itself.  If neither Windows nor
Linux can figure out how to access the file system, then it's probably
hopeless, short of pro data recover service.

Addamentum:

It wouldn't hurt to make a backup of the partition with dd and try to
use ntfsfix on the backup.