Hawk Software

Or, how Linux saved my stepmother’s photos.

It  started out as a simple project; recover my stepmother’s photos from her dead laptop.  The laptop had experienced video hardware problems and finally would no longer boot, so I was fairly sure the hard drive would still be working.  I removed the hard drive, connected it to a SATA to USB adapter, and connected it to my Windows XP laptop.  XP detected the new external drive and I thought I was in the clear, but of course, I was just getting started.

I went into the explorer and saw a new drive letter, but as soon as I looked at the files I realized it was the recovery partition, not the Windows boot partition.  So I looked again, but there was not another drive letter. For a moment I thought the worst; the drive’s partition table might be damaged.  But I first went into the administrative tools and fired up the computer management console.  I choose disk management, and confirmed that the boot partition (the second physical partition) was, in fact, there and clean but did not have a drive letter assigned to it.  No problem, just one step away from getting the files!

But no, XP gave me an obscure error that the partition had to be made active first, and to reboot to access it.  I was skeptical since XP did not ask me to make it active, and ‘Mark Partition as Active’ was grayed out, but a reboot would only take a few minutes so I did it.  OK, try it again: same message.  Time to fire up my Windows 7 computer, which I had to move back to my office because it had been connected to my HD TV to watch streaming videos.

Windows 7 also showed just the recovery partition, and when I went through the similar steps to assign a driver letter Windows 7 told me the resource was no longer available and to refresh the listing.  SIGH!!  I could not believe I was experiencing such a problem; I have used external USB drives with multiple partitions before without this problem.  Off to Google…

Well, Google assured me that this is actually a common problem when an external drive has more than one primary partition, that Windows can only handle a single primary partition and any additional must be logical partitions inside an extended partition. What?!?  Are we still back in the days of DOS? Windows has supported multiple primary partitions for some time, just look at any current PC with a recovery partition.  HOWEVER, Windows will only access the first primary partition on a USB hard drive.

Time to regroup – I wanted the photos NOW, but I did not have a spare SATA cable to connect it inside my Windows 7 desktop PC.  So I decided to take a few minutes and see what Ubuntu Linux could do.  I rebooted the desktop into Ubuntu, connected the drive, and saw BOTH partitions appear!  Finally, I could copy the files from from the boot partition and then copy them to another USB drive to return them to my stepmother.

I have no idea why Microsoft thought it was a good idea not so support ALL valid partition schemes on USB drives as they do on native drives.  How many others would have assumed the drive was bad and given up trying recovering years of irreplaceable photos? Yes, she should have had a backup, and that will be remedied.  All I know is Microsoft just gave me another reason to make the full switch to Linux, and one of these days I will just do it.