Repairing hard disk when Windows installation disk won't boot

Posted by Echows on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Echows
Published on 2012-12-04T16:26:17Z Indexed on 2012/12/04 17:10 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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data-recovery

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hard-drive-recovery

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hard-drive-failure

I'm trying to recover some data from a faulty hard disk with Windows installed on it (on which Windows won't even boot). I have tried so far:

Booting to Ubuntu live USB stick and running ntfsfix (didn't work)
Trying to mount the broken partition when running Ubuntu from usb stick (doesn't mount)
Running photorec image recovery tool from live Ubuntu (it found some stuff but not the images I was looking for)

Now as a last resort I got myself a Windows installation on a USB stick so that I can try fdisk, but the installer doesn't work. The loading screen shows up and then the installer crashes. The installer works fine on other computers. I suspect that the installer is trying to read the hard drive to see if there's something there but when it can't read one partition, it crashes.

On Ubuntu, I can mount other partitions except the one I'm interested in so at least the hard drive is not completely dead.

So the question is, what options do I have left? To be more specific, my goal is to recover some images from the faulty ntfs-partition on the hard drive. Other than that, I don't care about the contents of the hard disk.

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