I googled and found a guide which I have since lost, which instructed me to enter a series of commands into the linux terminal including $USER which should set the drive as read only, but I only got an 'only root can do that' message instead. Essentially seems to be says it can't mount it due to Windows being hibernated, which apparently is a common enough situation according to Google, though a bit strange as I thought I had set my laptop to only either Sleep or Shut Down, never Hibernate. Linux Mint did indeed show the correct Hard Drive in its file manager, yet trying to access it gave this error (you can slightly make out the strange shimmering distortion).

However, the file manager in Mini Windows XP did not seem to detect any onboard hard drive, so I grabbed my old USB stick I made with bootable Linux Mint which I'd used to move files to an external drive off my previous laptop last year.Īfter Linux loaded, the screen had a strange shimmery effect as if running water were being poured over it, but was readable so I proceeded. I initially tried this with the 'Mini Windows XP' from a USB stick I made with Hiren's Bootable CD. Haha, funny you should mention that the next thing I had tried after the last test was just getting a copy of all my personal files off, just in case.

Seagate seatools bootable usb