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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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What would be the best way for me to recover data from my old laptop's hard drive, which seems to have a bad superblock? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I got an external hard drive enclosure for the purpose of recovering some of the files from my old laptops hard drive. The hard drive and all of it's partitions show up in both disks and gparted but it wont mount. When I tried to mount it manually, it gave the error message stating that it can't read the superblock. I've never had to deal with this issue before, so the only things I've tried so far were fsck and the data recovery option in GParted, and neither of them helped.

I tried searching about it online but all of the solutions I found online either didn't work or required methods that are currently not possible for me. The hard drive had Ubuntu (22.04 if I remember correctly) installed on it and I just need access to the files in the sdd3 partition, which was formatted in ext4.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (14 children)

First step, in case you didn't do that yet: Create a disk image of the partition - you don't want to try data recovery on the actual data. Easiest is just using dd to dump the disk to another drive.

Next try running testdisk on the image to see if it can find the backup superblocks - if it does you can feed that to fsck to restore the filesystem.

If you know the blocksize of the filesystem you can also run mke2fs with the -S parameter - this will just write the superblocks. Again, only do that on a disk image, not the actual drive.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If the disc is corrupted it may be failing, recommending ddrescue over dd is probably a better call not knowing anything else about this situation. Essentially, no reason not to use it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I swear by ddrescue. It's a situation I strive to never be but i've been there before. I used it once to rescue an employees masters capstone project from their dead work laptop.

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