Can Wary live CD see NTFS hard disk drives?

[sideburns]

I haven't needed to use Puppy for the last few years, but do now. A friend of mine was given a used laptop with a broken XP installation and only 256MB RAM. As Puppy's very lean, I downloaded the Wary ISO and burned it. Last night, I took it to a private club I belong to and tested the CD on one of their machines, with XP Home installed. It booted and ran just fine but didn't find the hard disk. The mounter only showed the floppy and CD drives. My friend doesn't know Linux and would prefer to stick with what he knows if we can get it working again, so I need something that can let us examine his hard drive and see what's there. If it turns out that we can't fix XP, he's open to Linux because having a working computer is more important to him than what OS it runs. If this has been covered before, a pointer to the right thread/post would be greatly appreciated. Thanx in advance for any help.

[DPUP5520]

PupRescue which is listed in my sig is specifically made for rescuing windows PCs

[Sylvander]

See this thread...
Presently ongoing...

Attempting to use ddrescue to clone a bad HDD [source]...
To a new/good HDD [destination].
That has now been done.

We're almost at the final step of the fix right now.
I'm hoping he'll be able to see his partition contents on the newly cloned HDD...
By using GParted to "check" = scan&fix the coloned partitions on the new HDD.

[sideburns]

I'm downloading Pup Rescue 2.3 right now. I picked that instead of 2.5 because it appears to have more stuff to work with. I won't be able to test it, either at my club or on my friend's computer until Thursday at the earliest. Will report back when I know how it worked. Thanx!

Sylvander, I'd seen that thread, but didn't know if it were relevant or not because it's about an older version of Puppy, and whatever problems it had might have been cleared up by the time Wary came out.

I do, however feel a tad ashamed of myself for not thinking of fdisk, but it's not so much a matter of detecting the drive as it is mounting it.

[Sylvander]

1.

Wary...booted and ran just fine but didn't find the hard disk.

(a) My Wary-5.3 has a tendency to not display on the desktop, "drive" icons for the partition_file_systems of USB connected Flash Drives and HDD's.
Sees internal HDD's OK.
What type of hard disk didn't it find in your case?
Internal HDD?

(b) Does GParted see and display the physical HDD?

2.
(a) If you attempt to fix the partition_file_system of the problem drive...
By using fdisk...
Or...
GParted->"check"...
That could go horribly wrong and cause irreversible problems.

(b) Hence, before attempting that, it's a good idea to either:
Make a sector-for-sector image backup of the contents...
And/or...
CLONE the HDD [as with our thread using ddrescue], and attempt to fix the cloned copy.

3. The version of Puppy used has no bearing upon a problem with a HDD.
Unless, that is, that particular Puppy is simply failing to display icons on the desktop [for the partition_file_systems on the partition on the HDD].

[sideburns]

Wary not only didn't mount the hard drive on the test box, it couldn't find it or, at least, the mounter didn't. Alas, I didn't think of fdisk until today and didn't have time to try Gparted. And, as the test box runs XP Home just fine, TYVM, I'm not interested in trying any potentially damaging tests. Next Thursday, I'll try Rescue Puppy on both the test box and the munged laptop and see what happens. If the laptop's OS isn't worth fixing, I'll probably end up reformatting and installing Wary on it so that my friend will end up with a working computer.

[sideburns]

I tried again, last night, with Wary and the laptop. It booted, found and mounted both hard drive partitions just fine. I'm not sure what's wrong with the laptop, and we'll probably end up reinstalling XP, but at least I have something that can look at what's on the drive and let us find out what drivers he's going to need.

[cthisbear]

sideburns:

There used to be issues with some computers
that if you selected Xorg....

no hard drives were seen.

Select Xvesa >> magically they all displayed.

T think in Wary that you can still do this.

Particularly true of Puppy 4.3.1....at times.
This is still the main Pup I use most for rescues.

Strangely it still boots up on most recent computers.

:::::::::::

A whirlpool post of mine.

Retrieving data from old HDD

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-re ... ?t=1896934

Chris.

[sideburns]

The problem was with one of my club's computers, being used as a test of the CD. It works just fine for checking the drives on the b0rk laptop, as I wrote above.