HD content still unavailable

Andy Waddington (software devel) acornqa at pennine.demon.co.uk
Fri Nov 5 14:21:16 EDT 2010


Sometime before sending, Cyrus Curwood typed (and on Friday 2010-11-05 sent):

> There are 2 free tools you can use to help you find the file(s).

Three free tools, if you count the very simple step of booting a
Linux Live CD/DVD and using any of several handy command line
utilities. Mount your C drive somewhere (I tend to use /mnt/minefield
or something similarly derogatory:)

mkdir /mnt/minefield
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/minefield

( if you aren't sure which partition to mount, try
fdisk -l
which will usually make it obvious). Then

grep -r "<the string you're trying to find>" /mnt/minefield/*

[  man grep
  will tell you about all the other handy options, useful if your
  string might be tucked away in a binary file somewhere, or if,
  equally, you are sure that you don't want to search binaries... ]

or, if you believe you know (part of) the filename

find /mnt/minefield -name *thebityouknow*

Oh, a lot of Linux live CDs nowadays don't give you root without
typing "sudo" before every command. The first thing you do, any
time you're faced with such a system, is

sudo passwd root
su

You'll need to be root to mount your Windows disc (and to use
"fidsk -l"), and since the files are all owned root:root once
mounted, it's simplest to stay as root once it's mounted, since
you can then rename/delete/etc. any of the files.

Andy



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