Data Recovery Help Needed

[Ccomp5950]

If you must use a "desktop friendly environment" as your recovery environment you should turn off such features like auto-mounting (the root problem with that story with auto-fsck on dirty volumes following through and really screwing it up).

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100727040927706

That should stop any auto-fsck from occurring. You will have to manually mount the drive if that is what you want to do.

Me personally I use Plop Linux.

 

[300DDR]

Good point - I found that program long ago and forgot about it. A good suggestion for people who don't have the means to deactivate the MBR on the drive itself.

 

[nationalinquirer]

PenDriveLinux

Download an light bootable OS like Xubuntu and use PenDriveLinux to make it bootable. If that doesn't work use a CF card, make it usb, bootable and then convert it to IDE (or sata)