Ubuntu
util-linux package

Please help! - "unable to mount location"

Asked by Zara Ugbabe

Hello,
I am a Windows XP user. I recently received the "Blue Screen of Death - Unmountable_boot_volume" error while trying to start up my computer. I booted to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from a LiveCD in an attempt to access all my important files and save them to a USB.
I have not installed it fully for fear of losing all my data - I'm trying it without making any changes to my system. According to some instructions I found online, I need to go to Places and then Computer to access my files. This worked perfectly earlier in the summer when I encountered this BSOD problem; I was able to access my necessary files and save them to a USB (I've since lost said USB unfortunately = (

This time around when I went to Places and then computer the only folders that showed up are: "File System" and "100 GB Hard Disk: SQ004224P01". When I tried to open the latter it returned the following error: "DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." Next, I tried to force Ubuntu to use that drive (even though there's something wrong with it) by typing in the following command in a new Terminal: mount -t vfat -o umask=1000 /dev/sda1 /media/disk. This did not work (I got some complicated error message).

As an Ubuntu novice, I have no idea what any of this means or how to proceed from here. All I know is that I absolutely, unequivocally need to recover my files. I'm a desperately poor college student who really cannot afford to pay to have my files recovered so any help you can provide would be very much appreciated! = )

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Zara Ugbabe
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delance (olivier-delance) said : 		#1

"vfat" should be replaced by "ntfs-3g" if I remember.
The Windows disk is not formatted with FAT32, but NTFS.
Search on the Web the exact line to mount hard drive.

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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said : 		#2

sounds like you have a hardware failure on the drive. that is, the head crashed onto the platters and won't advance. if this is the case, you won't be able to recover the data yourself and it would cost lots of money to retrieve the data if it is even possible.

when you turn on the computer, do you hear loud clunking sounds from the hard drive?

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Zara Ugbabe (zahraela-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

Hi guys,
I got my system working again by some miraculous fluke...When I originally tried to mount the drive using the "nts-3g" command it returned an error message, which is why I tried the "vfat" one instead. Anyhow, I played around with the nts-3g command a little bit more as delance recommended and it started mounting. I didn't realize that the command was actually working so I killed the process and then saw the partially mounted drive on my desktop. For some reason, I decided to restart and while in the process of restarting and sliding in my Ubuntu Live CD, Windows started up again. It's working as smoothly as ever but I've backed up all my important files just in case.Thanks so much for your input!