Retriving data from Maxtor external HDD

**weswood88** · 08-03-2009, 11:08 PM

Well I was using my fathers HDD to transfer music between one of my computers to the other. Ive done this before and never had problems. But somehow my computer somewhat locked up and when i unplugged the HDD it seems it has corrupted it. Now I am now sure what to do as the HDD has alot of valuable photos from our family vacations and such and I could not find a way to get into it from windows... so i made a knoppix liveCD knppox 5.0 and put it in and it works, but when i try to open up the external HDD it says

"Could not Mount Device,
The reported error was:
Failed to load $MFT:Input/Output error
Failed to startup volume: input/output error
couldn't mount device '/dev/sdc1' : input/output error
Mount Failed.

Not sure what to do next...is there any possiblity of at least retrieving the data? i dont care much about the HDD but i dont think my father backed up those photos, i think this was his backup (he may not have realized how bad HDD are to use as backup).

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-03-2009, 11:22 PM

Unfortunately, I have had Windows roach several external hard drives beyond recovery (even when used on just one system, moving between different systems can add more issues). I can't recover my data, you may not be able to either.

However, before giving up I would look at the gpart command or the testdisk command. If the partition table and not the partitions themselves is the problem, gpart can recover the partition table for you. gpart seems to be a much better choice to use than testdisk and will give you more control over the operation, but if you refuse to read the instructions and learn how to use gpart properly, testdisk can also try to recover the disk partition, although it gives you much less control over it.

**weswood88** · 08-03-2009, 11:42 PM

im sorry but i honestly have no idea where to start, im looking all around to try and execute test disc or the other thing, and i just cannot find it.. im using knoppix 5.0... is there a specific command for the command prompt? if u could give me any instructions i would be incredibly greatful, id like to try everything i can before i tell him what happened to the HDD >.<

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-04-2009, 12:17 AM

At the command prompt type man gpart to read the man page for gpart. Type man testdisk to read the man page for testdisk (although I recommend gpart over testdisk).

**weswood88** · 08-04-2009, 01:27 AM

how long is this gpart supposed to take....the external harddrive is listed as "sdc" on the knoppix desktop...so i tried using the command

sudo gpart /dev/sdc and the terminal just says "begin scan" and just sits there....i let it sit there for a good 15 minutes and nothing different came up... is it supposed to do this? or am i shit out of luck?

**Harry Kuhman** · 08-04-2009, 02:15 AM

I have no idea how long it is going to take. I have never run it on USB, USB drives are slow, I don't know the size of the USB drive, and I don't even know if you are using USB2 or the deadly slow USB1.1. I doubt that 15 minutes was long enough. You should get some sort of output when the program is good and ready, I would think that you should wait for it. Personally I would also look for signs of hard drive activity, that should have started when the program was started, such as flashing of a drive access light or even seeking sounds coming from the hard drive (a stethoscope is great for listening to this). If all hard drive activity stopped for an extended period of time I might suspect that something was wrong, otherwise I would wait.