A friend brought this WD My Passport external harddrive to me to see if I could recover her files. The device is "not working" after a power outage. As per her testimony, when the device is connected Windows "recognizes" the drive (whatever that means) but she "cannot see her files".
On my Ubuntu 14.10 machine, I get this far:
$ lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1058:0748 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Passport 1TB USB 3.0
These two devices showed up while the drive was connected but disappeared after it was removed:
crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 3 Jan 11 19:30 sg3
crw------- 1 root root 21, 4 Jan 11 19:30 sg4
I may have missed something else in /dev/
or in one of the subdirectories. I don't know if the following file is related as it remains even after unplugging the drive:
$ ls -la /dev/usb
crw------- 1 root root 180, 0 Jan 11 19:00 hiddev0
I disassembled the casing hoping to get a SATA or IDE interface to the drive, but the device has the USB 3.0 connection right on the PCB. There are what appear to be a few empty jumpers (like those found on older IDE drives) but they are not accessible from the outside of the casing.
What would be the next step to try to mount this drive? Ideally I'd like to dd
its contents to a safe place then fsck
with a bit of prayer. I'm not sure if the device is formatted FAT or NTFS as Western Digital seems to sell devices with either partition type. Might I do any additional damage if I try to mount /dev/sg3
or /dev/sg4
as the wrong type of FAT or NTFS?
Edit: The devices at/dev/sg3
and /dev/sg4
will not mount. Here is the result of the mount attempt:
$ ls -la | grep sg
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 140 Jan 11 20:43 bsg
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 1, 11 Jan 11 19:00 kmsg
crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 0 Jan 11 19:00 sg0
crw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 21, 1 Jan 11 19:00 sg1
crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 2 Jan 11 19:00 sg2
crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 3 Jan 11 20:43 sg3
crw------- 1 root root 21, 4 Jan 11 20:43 sg4
$ mkdir ~/inbal
$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sg
sg0 sg1 sg2 sg3 sg4
$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sg4 ~/inbal
[sudo] password for dotancohen:
Error reading bootsector: Illegal seek
Failed to sync device /dev/sg4: Invalid argument
Failed to mount '/dev/sg4': Illegal seek
$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sg3 ~/inbal
Error reading bootsector: Illegal seek
Failed to sync device /dev/sg3: Invalid argument
Failed to mount '/dev/sg3': Illegal seek
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sg4 ~/inbal
mount: /dev/sg4 is not a block device
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sg3 ~/inbal
mount: /dev/sg3 is not a block device
/dev/sd…
(sd letter), and (sd letter number) for the partitions. If you get some partitions then you can usefsck
etc./dev/sg3
or/dev/sg4
. I've updated the question.-t
flag with mount and an appropriate format, i.e.,mount -t ntfs /dev/sg3 /mnt
. Usually if the format isn't right, the OS will complain. Once you do mount it though, add
should be fine to dump the contents.mount
is necessary todd
. Is OP trying to mount it to assess damage or to actually performdd
?