Getting data from a dead WinXP laptop HDD ?

as per your ntfsls question, i can't check it for sure atm but i'd figure you'd need to add a sudo before running the command as it appears to be trying to mount the drive and you can't do that without the proper permissions :]

did you try running the ntfsfix program? do you need to write to the hard drive? once you get all the data you want off the drive, theres also a -o force (i believe) option that you could try to see if it'll let you write to the drive. altho i'd try fixing it before taking any drastic measures >.<

A missing sudo makes sense, don't think I tried it that way either.

ntfsfix was on my list on things to try, but when gprated showed me the heads needed to be 255 instead of the 240 that was suggested by testdisk I just kinda ran with it.

I don't plan on making the NTFS writable, after another day or so of making sure I've grabbed everything I need off the disk & reading about *nix filesystems, i'm going to wipe the drive & increase the storage on that box from about 6GB to 46GB.

sounds like a great idea to me

ext3 ftw, lol

I've grabbed almost all the data I needed from the NTFS partition, I missed a few configuration files for small things like FTP interface settings that I didn't think I'd need.

I repartitioned the HDD into multiple ext3 partitions & reconfigured Apache & MySQL to have their own dedicated partitions for data/webpages on the drive.
As I type this I figure a 6-7 GiB partition at the end of the drive to mirror the primary drive is probably a good idea since the primary drive is years older than the laptop drive & is getting kinda loud these days.

I almost crapped myself after I figured out all I had to do to restore the MySQL data from the laptop to the new box was chown the new MySQL data partition from mysql:mysql to me:me long enough to FTP the databases' folders into that data partition then recursively chown that directory back to mysql:mysql & finally chown a couple files to root:root.

wow, thats awesome. congrats :]