Recover file list from NTFS formatted (MBR) failing hard drive

Question

My Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB USB hard disk is not detected on Windows(explorer, disk management, safety remove dialog all crashes when I plug in) but on fedora, it takes 2 minutes to automount of the partition to occur. It consumes a lot of time to just open a folder and reading from the hard drive is almost impossible except for a very few no. of files.

The S.M.A.R.T data is not accessible at all, and writing data to the external HDD is impossible.

Smartctl doesn't return anything except error codes for this drive.

However I managed to recover 2.8GB of pictures at a very slow speed(maybe 10KBps) from the HDD over a period of many many hours. Those files alone are still accessible, albeit at 100KBps or so.

I need to know the list of files and folders that have been stored on the partition, and I think the mft data might help me out. How can I read the mft data so that the files and folders that had been stored on the partition can be known? Is there any way the first few thousands of sectors can be "dd" ed to a separate img file so that the file and folder list can be harvested?

Answer 1

Try TestDisk to recover your data. It should be available in your package manager (don't know which distro you are using).

Of course you can try to dd the drive. This makes sense in case your drive completely fails. It won't get better... You can also run TestDisk on an image file (e.g. testdisk dd.img).