I have an external hard drive that is no longer recognized, no longer a desktop icon.
It shows up in >Preferences >Hardware >Disks but, it will not open, there is no option for “mounting” it either.
Also, it says it is “Not Partitioned” however, my other ext hd says it is partitioned as “Master Boot Record”.
I have read that the “Master Boot Record” can be repartitioned onto the hard drive without loosing data however, I would like more information before attempting this.
Can anyone tell me if there is a video on youtube that shows how to do this?
Can anyone recommend a partitioning software?
I’m no geek but will try this with the right info.
Hello
Before doing anything with the drive if you have data that you care about you should make an image of the whole drive on a bigger drive.
I don’t know if it’s possible to repair a partition table without loosing the data. Gparted has an “Attempt Data Rescue” function that I’ve never tried either under the “Device” tab.
I had not thought of doing an ‘image’ nor had I heard of it as a way to save the data.
I still don’t know much about doing an ‘image’.
If I do the ‘image’ to another hard drive, then that ‘image’ would be usable right?
Then I could reformat the smaller drive and start using it for someothing else …
Would Clonezilla work for making an ‘image’ of the drive that won’t open?
I have used Clonezilla to backup internal hard drives.
I will look on youtube for taking an ‘image’, I really do not know anything about doing an ‘image’.
I just read 2 post that say Clonezilla will do the trick. I will do a test on something else before imaging the problem Ext HD.
OK I gave it a try and this is what I got in return:
“Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognized disk label
Unknown partition table format for file /tmpocs_onthefly_local.op1Abn/src-pt.parted!
Program terminated!!”
This is from an attempt to Clone the unrecognized Ext HD with Clonezilla.
You can not mount or see any of the data on this drive.
This is a delicate situation to be in and if there is important data on this drive that you can not obtain anywhere else, then first step is to create a copy of the data on the disk, so you are free to experiment with recovering the data without risk of making the situation worse.
I am not sure of what utilities there are to accomplish this task, It seems that you have tried clonezilla and that has not worked. If it were me, I would use 'dd' to dump the disk but be warned, that can take a very long time given a large disk.
After you have made a copy you can try various recovery utilities to attempt to recover your data. If anything happens you can work from a copy of the copy of the disk that you made. Just because your partition table is corrupt doesn't necessarily mean that your data is gone. Once you have dumped the disk you can also re-partition, format and test the disk to make sure it is not a hardware problem. I use 'gparted' for that sort of thing.
sudo apt-get install gparted
If on the other hand, the data on the disk can be recovered in other ways then you can just use a partitioning utility like 'gparted' to repartition and format the drive.
