Recovering data from a usb hard drive

steinooo · 30 Dec 2010 at 20:25

hi all,

I have a thread in General Hardware but thought I'd post here now as it's become a linux issue.

If I do "df" and can't see an attached USB drive (which I think to be formatted at least partly in ntfs), does it mean that the drive is basically shafted? I believe this drive to be troublesome but not completely dead as per my op.

tntcoder · 30 Dec 2010 at 20:38

df will only show you mounted drives.

Does it show up under "fdisk -l" (as root/sudo)?

If it doesn't show up under fdisk then yes it's most likely a hardware error and you can kiss goodbye to it.

If however it shows up under fdisk, first take a 'dd' dump of the partition you want to save e.g "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/me/mydump.bin", where sda1 is the drive in question. Once that's done, try mounting it and see if it's browsable - if it's not run something like testdisk against it.

unp|dissy · 30 Dec 2010 at 20:55

Yeah.. df just shows mounted devices.

Plug it in and type dmesg this will show if the kernel recognises it and shows the device

(e.g. /dev/sdb )

You can then mount /dev/sdb to the filesystem.. e.g

sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt

If you've overwritten data, or need to recover, thy the knoppix bootable distro, and use am application called photorec

steinooo · 30 Dec 2010 at 22:22

thanks guys, I managed to get it to show up in df in the end, but by keep wiggling it around in my caddy, then every now and again after a file copy from the drive, it gave me input/output errors, I'm putting this down to a duff drive. I have managed to get the important docs off it anyway so i'm really happy, thanks for your help!

Plus now I know how to do this it's a very very handy skill indeed

Jacko197 · 30 Dec 2010 at 22:55

Nice one mate, glad you got it sorted it in the end

steinooo · 30 Dec 2010 at 23:56

yea was going to reply to you in GH mate, thanks very much

learned a useful trick there as well, i'm always asked to do this in my job!

BigglesPiP · 31 Dec 2010 at 00:51

Safecopy is a good tool if you're getting medium errors. You can run it over and over and it won't re-copy stuff that came off without an I/O error. In theory after enough passes you get a good copy of your data.

http://safecopy.sourceforge.net/

Your distro probably comes with it, or it may be in the repo.