Recover corrupted NTFS with Ubuntu.

[hariks0]

I have a 250 GB external HD in NTFS. It was used to transport data between my office [*******] and home [Ubuntu 9.10]. While doing a reinstall of wxp this HD was attached to the office pc. Now the File system of this External HD is Raw. I am sure that wxp has not formatted this as the result would be only an NTFS disk, not raw. I tried the disk utility in Ubuntu and the it displays that the Disk is healthy.

Is there a way to get the data in this disk back using Ubuntu utilities. I thought I would wait for your replies before formatting.:(

[Zorael]

It depends on what happened, I guess. It sounds like the partition table was deleted.

You can try using testdisk (in the universe repositories) to search for lost partitions. That should work if the partition is still physically *there* but undefined in the (potentially missing) table.

[jenaniston]

I have a 250 GB external HD in NTFS. . . . While doing a reinstall of wxp this HD was attached to the office pc.
Now the File system of this External HD is Raw. I am sure that wxp has not formatted this as the result would be only an NTFS disk, not raw. I tried the disk utility in Ubuntu and the it displays that the Disk is healthy.

Is there a way to get the data in this disk back using Ubuntu utilities. I thought I would wait for your replies before formatting.:(

I have used linux - Fedora or Ubuntu - to rescue files off partitions messed up by Windows . . .
and would be encouraging that it may be very probable for you to get at these files . . .

How do the different partition utilities "see" the external HD . . . ?
do not assume all will see it the same when it is corrupted/messed up.

Try

# sfdisk -lalso see and compare results from . . .
parted
then at prompt parted > select /dev/hdx (select device) ( usually have to q quit)
cfdisk /dev/hdx (need to specify device. . . and then quit at table "button")

Don't write anything to (reformat) the partition - just list the partition and filesystem type.

[hariks0]

Now here are the outputs:-


hari@Indira:~$ sudo sfdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 30401 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 6373 6374- 51199123+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 6374 30400 24027 192996877+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda5 6374+ 12747 6374- 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/sda6 12748+ 19121 6374- 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/sda7 29793+ 30400 608- 4883728+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 19122+ 21889 2768- 22233928+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 21890+ 29792 7903- 63480816 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 5690 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0+ 30399 30400- 244187968+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sdb3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sdb4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty


Both 'parted' and 'cfdisk' returned error messages. But Gparted recognizes the 250 GB HD as unallocated 43.59 GB.

Also my pc refused to boot with this HD connected via USB. It was not so before. So it seems that after running 'Testdisk' there had been some improvement.