a problem with the hard drive has been detected

Question

hey i really need some help .this is what happened my laptop fell(it was running windows 7) and the computer stopped working normally.i decided to connect it to my desktop(which already contained a hard disk) to try and recover the info.i thought since there was two hard disks that i had to use raid instead of ahci. i then changed it back to ahci when i released it was wrong .i detached my desktop hd and booted into live image .but i keep receiving the following text that flashes before the os starts:

"the following are warnigs that were detected during this boot. these can be viewed in setup on the event log page WARNING:A problem with the hard drive has been detected."

after i boot i can see the hard disk but i cant access it, i get get this message when i try to :

"Unable to mount location

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs-mst-post-read-fixup-warn:

Record 1 has no FILE magic oxffffffff)

Failed to open inode $MFTMirr: Input/output error

Failed to load $MFTMirr: Input/output error

Failed to mount idev'sda3: Input/output error

NTFs is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault or it's a

SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk on Windows

then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the If parameter is very

important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate

it and mount a different device under the Idewmapper/ directory (e.g.

Idev/mapper/nvidia-eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid documentation

for more details."

plz be specific and detailed. thx

Answer 1

This is an unfortunate mix of problems. You probably now have 2 sets of errors:

Dropping a running hard drive will potentially cause a hardware problem from the drop, + a soft error as the writing head drags across the platters

Additionally raid is going to have corrupted your partitions/files, on both drives - but the h/w error will only affect the laptop drive.

I would suggest you concentrate initially on retrieving the desktop drive; check your partitions using parted --list. If the output looks sensible, run fsck on the partitions (you will likely find you have lost your partition structure though). This is really only recoverable if you know the original layout, or it's worth a try of creating one large partition (the whole disk) & just see if it was right..

If not then you will probably want a tool like foremost run from a live CD/USB and a spare (USB?) drive - this will recover files from a corrupted drive but loses the filenames.. You can run it over both drives, use fdupes to eliminate common files from both. You then get to play the media files, read the text files, renaming as you go.. Long job. You can reinstall your OS's once the files are recovered.