How to recover from a corrupt HDD Image

[stormj]

So, if you're like me, 1884 has been an unmitigated disaster, and you've had so many kernel panics that you can't count them. (I've tried reverting to 1848 with no luck--and it was stable under -legacy).

If you're also like me, you have some stuff on your image that's important, yet you neglect to back it up often. (I have a DVD that's about a month old at this point.)

So, all these KPs are inevitably going to corrupt your HDD image one day, right? Right. It happened to me tonight, but I've been able to partially recover. Here's how.

(1) Download Knoppix (that's Linux geek for Save-Your-Ass-CD) live CD .iso
(2) Create a new VM for Debian Linux.
(3) Create a new HD with enough capacity to copy what's on your corrupt one.
(4) Mount them both, but use the Knoppix CD as the boot volume.
(5) In Knoppix, run qparted and create a FAT32 partition on the NEW hd.
(6) Copy your files over.

I doubt you'll be able to boot, but you'll get your data off. At this point, I just want my Quicken files.
I'll report back later on what happens next.

Oh, and, if anyone has a better idea, or the Parallels team is considering makign an ntfs repair tool, let me know.

 

[MarkHolbrook]

Storm,

For me 1884 has been stable as a rock set in concrete. I'm on a MBP with 2gb RAM. I do regularly backup my VM though. It's 16gb and takes 8 minutes to copy but it's worth it. I just move it around to different disks with a date on each copy.

But so far 1884 has not paniced once. Now all I'm doing is Delphi and a little bit of file copying and some very minor other programs. Thats all I ever do in my XP vm. But so far it's been great.

Sorry to hear you are having troubles. Since going back a version didn't seem to help, is there anyway your VM might have troubles that are triggering the issues in both versions? Just a thought.

M