I got an external hard drive enclosure for the purpose of recovering some of the files from my old laptops hard drive. The hard drive and all of it’s partitions show up in both disks and gparted but it wont mount. When I tried to mount it manually, it gave the error message stating that it can’t read the superblock. I’ve never had to deal with this issue before, so the only things I’ve tried so far were fsck and the data recovery option in GParted, and neither of them helped.
I tried searching about it online but all of the solutions I found online either didn’t work or required methods that are currently not possible for me. The hard drive had Ubuntu (22.04 if I remember correctly) installed on it and I just need access to the files in the sdd3 partition, which was formatted in ext4.
Try
testdisk. It can copy files from damaged filesystem without touching it. But only if you are lucky enough and the filesystem is not so heavily damaged thattestdiskwill be unable to find it.Assuming I’m using it correctly, it doesn’t seem to be working for me. It sees the partitions but then it says that they can’t be recovered. But it’s weird because it’s for some reason saying that there is two unreadable partitions called “ms data”, which unless it’s referring to some partitions that were deleted when I install Ubuntu, I have no idea what they are supposed to be.
Yes, it could find partitions removed long time ago if filesystem headers were not overriden.
The quick and dirty way I’ve used is…
Use the nbd system (network block devices) and qemu to create a qcow2 image with your defective device as the base device. Serve this qcow2 image with qemu-nbd and attach it as a NBD device locally. Then run fsck or testdisk on the NBD device. This will let you repair the filesystem Linux sees without writing to the disk. Testdisk can scan for any filesystems left on the device if the partitions no longer match filesystems.
Also, if all else fails use photorec to slice the file types you need.
Also, ddrescue can try to read any actually failing sectors and work out what they contain, but puts a lot of stress on the device.
Beware, any method that puts more wear on the disk should not be used unless you’re willing to accept the risk that the drive could get worse.
I don’t know how to do any of that first part. All of the data on the drive is replaceable, it’s just going to be very tedious and time consuming. I’m currently trying one other method and I think after I’m done with that, that I’m just going to skip trying to recover the data. I had some other plans for what I wanted to do with this device and I think trying to recover the data isn’t worth it at this point.
