Can Wine be configured to access unmountable harddrive?

[jsstevenson]

Hello...

I am trying to run a program under linux using wine called "Recover My Files". This program is designed to recover data from corrupted harddrives contining FAT and NTFS partitions by reading them sector by sector or cluster by cluster.

The thing is, the drive in question is unmountable due to logic problems on the device, which it appears is rendering the drive invisible to the program (Recover My Files) I am trying to use under Wine. Running on Windows the program can see and inspect and read the unmountable drive. Equally the drive is accessible to Linux (though not mountable), via the dd command as an example.

The question is, is there a way of making this device (/dev/sdc) visible to wine without the luxury of mounting it, thus enabling "Recover My Files" to see the drive in question and perform its low-level inspection and recovery processes?

Thanks
Jamie

[vitamin]

The question is, is there a way of making this device (/dev/sdc) visible to wine without the luxury of mounting it, thus enabling "Recover My Files" to see the drive in question and perform its low-level inspection and recovery processes?

You can try this:

Code: Select all

mkdir /tmp/c
ln -s /tmp/c ~/.wine/dosdevices/f:
ln -s /dev/sdc ~/.wine/dosdevices/f::

However I don't think you'll get far with it because Wine does not support low level hdd access.

[jsstevenson]

Thanks for the suggestion...

Unfortunately you seem to be right - the drive is still not accessible. I might have to install windows to deal with this one, which will be a bit of a pain!

Thanks again.
Jamie.

[vitamin]

Thanks for the suggestion...

Unfortunately you seem to be right - the drive is still not accessible.

Have you checked if you have access to that device? Usually only root can access disk devices.

[jsstevenson]

Yes I have been running the program as root...

gksu wine .<program_name.exe>

[Tlarhices]

Thanks for the suggestion...

Unfortunately you seem to be right - the drive is still not accessible. I might have to install windows to deal with this one, which will be a bit of a pain!

Thanks again.
Jamie.

Did you tried native tools for this ?
I have used successfully photorec (which does not only recover pictures, but a lot more like programs, music, ...) on an NTFS drive so crashed that even tools under windows could not handle.

There is a tutorial here :
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/rec ... ted-files/

[jsstevenson]

Thanks for reply Tlarhices.

Yes I have used Photorec and recovered about 80GB of files but as you will know photorec achieves this by a low-level read of the drive by looking for file headers and footers and as such cannot retrieve filenames, folder structures or other attributes of the data that the MFT entries would produce.

I have run the windows program "Recover My Files" on a windows box and it can recover nearly 140GB of data in its original state (names, attributes, folders, etc) by searching at sector level for the signature of MFT entries which it can then reconstruct...but... I was only using my old laptop with windows installed to scan the drive (the scan took 5days!) and now I have to save the files that it has identified but I only have 10GB on the laptop and USB 1.1 on the laptop also. The problem in that setup is that the corrupted drive is connected to the laptop through an external USB drive enclosure thus for me to save the 140GB of identified files will take forever as the laptop pulls them from the USB drive via a USB 1.1 port!! This is why it would be nice to get the program working on my Linux box which doesn't suffer from any such bottlenecks!

I was really impressed with photorec though when I used it a few weeks ago - definately a life-saver at that time.

Thanks