If you have a disaster, an unreadable HDD or Corrupted Partition on windows but the drive can still detected on CMOS/BIOS, you still have hope in recovering your data using a linux installation.

* Download first DSL (damn small linux) on this sites...

Current Full Mirror List:

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/
http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/
http://mirror.psunit.com/dsl/
http://dsl.thegeekery.com
ftp://ftp.is.co.za/linux/distributions/damnsmall/ (South Africa)
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/damnsmall/ (Austria) also rsync and FTP
http://gulus.USherbrooke.ca/pub/distro/DamnSmallLinux/Location: (Quebec, Canada)
http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/ (Belgian)
ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/damnsmalllinux/ (Belgian)
http://planetmirror.com/pub/damnsmall/
ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/damnsmall/
http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/damnsmalllinux.org/
ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/damnsmalllinux.org/

- Then burn the ISO image

- After You have burn the CD, configure your BIOS to start on CD first.

- Configure your un-readable or corrupted HDD as Primary Master

- The Computer Will boot on Boot Image (DSL)

* after booting you will see the GUI of the DSL, run TERMINAL
and follow this command

*Note: this command will make you a super user in DSL

#sudo su

*Note: this command will mount you HDD on DSL

#mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

*Note: this command will check if your data is still on the HDD

#cd /mnt/hda1
#ls -al

*Note: If your data is still there, your lucky.. Now Shutdown your PC and put a secondary working HDD formatted as FAT32 to copy your data.

*Repeat steps..

#sudo su
#mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

*Note: This command will mount your secondary slave HDD, and make a folder "backup"

#mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1
#cd /mnt/hdc1
#mkdir backup

- Then after mounting the another HDD, you can copy your files from the corrupted HDD to working HDD

#cp -R /mnt/hda1/*.* /mnt/hdc1/backup

aeonmike (",)