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.I have had great results with testdisk. At one point my dad’s external hard drive was so messed up that a local IT company couldn’t fix it. Mind you all our family and vacation pictures where on there, so it was kind of important. I think it took me a couple of hours, but with testdisk I was able to recover everything
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.