I suffered failure in my harddisk with bluescreen showing "UNMOUNTABLE BOOT DEVICE".

Searching through the web and tried the few programs commonly mentioned here (ontrack recovery etc) are not working well.

The fault is in recognising the harddisk through an external casing. Windows can't even mount the harddisk.

I don't have PCs at home so plugging the harddisk via the IDE connector is not an option.


Microsoft website suggested to:

1. CHKDSK /F
2. FIXBOOT
3. FIXMBR

All of the above failed.

I have 60GB of solid data which I haven't backup for 6 months. This is no fun.

When all hopes are gone, I stumbled upon a simple posting in a forum mentioning "Knoppix able to see the harddisk as and all files are recovered"

This is when I started out investigating Knoppix.

It turns out to be a Linux system, ready to run from CD.

I downloaded the 700MB ISO, burn it to a CD, and boot up my dead machine.

To my surprise, I am reading my harddisk (after plugging it back into the laptop) like there is nothing wrong with it!! This is done without any alien command line, all through the windows like GUI.


I quickly plug in an external disk to back up all my data. Managed to recover every single file I have.


Now I am keeping the crashed 60GB harddisk in an external case (unwilling to reformat it knowing formating will solve the problem). When plug in to a Windows machine, you can't mount the disk at all and will get an $MFT error. Of course, with suggestion for you to run CHKDSK (that doesn't work).

This harddisk is the evident I am keeping to show how Microsoft can f**k us up while Linux can rescue the day.


Lastly, I am not an IT expert but just an average user. The scary story of unfriendly Linux is no longer in me after I try it out myself. Knoppix Version 5.1.1. IT'S LEGALLY FREE!


Here you go:
http://www.knoppix.com/