I was able to recover an unmountable drive, heres how

[uparmor]

So i had a buddies 80g seagate pc hard drive. He had all kinds of stuff on it and no backup.

He had brought it to a local shop and they said it was toast and needed to go into a file recovery service for 1200 dollars.

He handed it to me and i advised him it was most likely dead but i would take a look.

I tried using a usb to pata adapter and mount it in linux, no joy. I looked at the drive with some disk tools and i could see all the partitions.

Nothing i did would allow me to mount it. I googled the problem and folks suggested a live gparted cd and photorec.

I burned a dvd and booted it up. I inserted a flash drive and mounted for a place to recover data just in case. I ran photorec on entire disk.

After a couple mins photorec saw the drive and allowed me to search for the lost file extensions ( jpg, pdf, qdb, doc, xcl, etc).

Within mins i noticed it had found the first files and recovered it to the usb flash. I open the file and it was intact.

So now its scanning away finding all his stuff.

Just a heads up if you ever have or run into a really stubborn drive.

[SheepDog78]

I've been able to recover data from a HDD in Linux before when Winblows wouldn't recognize it, didn't Use Gparted though. Used Gparted for other stuff, like prepping a server volume for ESXi.

It's good that you're seeing data, but don't get too excited just yet. I've recovered data from bad HDDs and flash drives before, and while you may see a long list of files, those are just indexes. The real data may still be lost to some extent. You'll probably get a whole slew of half pictures or "unable to display" errors, garbled docs, etc. Hopefully you'll be able to recover a good amount though.

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[Marauder2003]

And now is the time to talk to your buddy about backups. Either a local 2nd HD or a cloud solution.

[SkyHawk]

Good to hear it is working. I also like Zero Assumption Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

And now is the time to talk to your buddy about backups. Either a local 2nd HD or a cloud solution.

And this ^^^ I use Crashplan https://www.crashplan.com/

Cheapest unlimited cloud backup provider. They even let you use their software free for local and remote backup to friends/family etc.

[KSH]

I've used this successfully many many times: http://lsoft.net/file_recovery.aspx

[SonofWWIIDI]

I wouldn never "mount" a disk drive...the port is just to small for my probe.

[norcal77]

On a couple occasions I've actually been able to recover data from failed drives that I stuck in the freezer in a static bag w a bunch of desiccant packs, bought me enough time to boot as a slave and pull data off...gonna have to try this trick one day, might prevent a trip to drivesavers

[the86d]

PhotoRec is my go-to tool, even if names are random, THEY have to sort through them...

I have used it via Windows, and Linux distros.

[uparmor]

PhotoRec is my go-to tool, even if names are random, THEY have to sort through them...

I have used it via Windows, and Linux distros.

So I have got over 700 files now. BUT its saying its going to take 6.5 months to finish. Man the drive must be toast.

[uparmor]

I've used this successfully many many times: http://lsoft.net/file_recovery.aspx

Its an exe, it must be run on windows. You need a way to boot to a dvd and restore to flash, it cannot be done from a failed drive. Also if a trojan destroyed the drive you do not want to get to it from windows.