downloading now will update you soon. thanks! i really hope this live usb will help me access these drives
ok i have newest version of ubuntu gnome installed on a spare drive laying around. I went to disks and found the hard drive(2tb) that has been giving me troubles and it says it has 2 different partitions on it. @Adubs @Big_Al_Tech @Zibob
how do i access these drives? what do i need to do?
end goal it to take the 1tb of data off the 2tb drive and put it on the 3tb drive which is having the same issues as the 2tb(unallocated in windows and cant be accessed). but before i wipe/add new volumes etc i want to make sure 3tb hard drive has nothing on it.
edit…i got dolphin installed and it does not find the 2tb hard drive in devices.
Can you share a screenshot of disks?
Yea it can’t even detect the partition. Have you also done what adubs suggested?
I know @wendell has done magic with spinning rust perhaps he might be able to help.
Otherwise I do have to go for a bit, will check in later.
i will try testdisk now. thanks 
i hope i dont lose this data.
if the data is really important you should dd rescue the entire drive to another drive and work from the copy. one mistake and it really will be gone forever.
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thanks but most of that was “crazy foreign moon language” lol
next step? deeper search or write? when i hit P on each partition none of the files showed, I got an error saying it was not supported or something similar.
ideally “raw” copy (or dd in linux parlance) the entire drive to another known-good drive
obviously the dd command and it’s various versions are good for that.
If you must use Windows, I’ve had pretty good success with this little Windows-based util - it’s free which is nice
http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
once you’ve copied the bits to another platter then you can experiment with other utilities to either:
- repair or recover the whole partition with intact file system (best-case scenario)
- recover the raw files with or without names and folders (not as pretty)
- send it away for forensic recovery (EXPENSIVE!)
doing #1 I’ve had success with Active@ partition recovery, however it’s not free.
TestDisk is supposed to be very good for this type of thing, I’ve used it’s pair program “Photorec” which is generally designed to do #2 in the list above.
#2 can be done by a large number of different programs, such as Piriform’s Recuva (a fairly light-weight recovery program, but it’s FREE) or the before mentioned “Photorec” which actually works really well
#3 is $$$$
Hope I helped!
If testdisk doesn’t work out…If I dd rescue the drive to a known working drive will it transfer all the files and be fine right(I’ll be able to access them like normal)? Then can I format/put a new volume on the troubled drive and have it work normal again?
once i install ddrescue what do i do? what are the commands? i dont want to mess this up. thanks @Big_Al_Tech @Zibob @Adubs
i will clone this difficult drive to a working drive.
Sorry if I misled a little. I know very little about this either, just that their are a wealth of tools and option for the task under Linux.
I would also be stumbling through this like you if I had to do the same thing. Sorry but I am no help from this point on. Others, as they have all ready, will be far more able to help out. Just in case it looked like I was ignoring you.
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… Just how important are these files?
ddrescue is mainly just to make a copy of the bad drive at a low level so that you can do whatever you want to the copy without fear of losing the original. It would be helpful if you told us exactly what you have done in testdisk so far. If you are using a tutorial as I suggested you do before what step did you get to?
not that important but i really rather not lose them. i am almost certain its not a hardware problem and its just a stupid easy software problem that i created somehow.
I had errors stating something similar to bad jump in fat partition and bad jump in sectors or similar. then i got to the screen shots in above post. I could not see any of the files or folders when i hit p at those screens and didnt know what to do so i quit. I guess i should have did deeper search. I can run test disk again.
i am doing deep search now because when i hit P on the partitions it didn’t show files or folders(second picture). @Adubs
