I am helping a friend to recover data from damage external hard drive .
(USB 2, 120GB, WD, single partition, FAT32)
Problem:
When plug in this HDD into a windows PC, the HDD can be detected, but the drive did not show up. Checked using 'Disk Management', Found 'Disk 1' and shows that Disk 1 is not initialized.
1st Attempt:
Tried the 'Freezer trick' twice.
First time: manage to view the drive for 5 seconds, tried to copy all files, it stuck there after press Ctrl+C.
Second time: No luck, back to Not Initialized condition.
2nd Attempt:
After browsing through few article, I decided to try Ubuntu for the first time.
I am running Ubuntu on a DVD disk. After boot up the system, the external drive is not mounted. Through some trial and error using Terminal, I manage to find out that:
/dev/sda is my laptop HDD (750GB, with multiple drive)
/dev/sdb is the external HDD (120GB, Damaged drive)
At first, I try to use Testdisk 6.14 to recover data, but due to the external HDD is not mounted, Testdisk unable to detect it.
So I tried to mount it using Command in Terminal:
sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/ubuntu -t ext2
Result:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
Then I tried
dmesg | tail
Message (*) shows
[33935.683953] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb]
[33935.683954] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[33935.683955] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb]
[33935.683956] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
[33935.683958] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb]
[33935.683959] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
[33935.683960] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB:
[33935.683961] Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 02 00
[33935.683965] end_request: critical medium error, dev sdb, sector 2
[33935.683991] EXT4-fs (sdb): unable to read superblock
Question:
What is the meaning of Message (*)?
Is the data in this HDD still recoverable?
What should I do next?