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My external hard disk is busy packing up. I tried to access the drive to save some photo's, but no success through Windows disk management. So I tried my linux box at work, read up about the fsck cmd on an external drive


sudo fsck /dev/sdc and got this
"Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc" e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) ^Ce2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193


So next step:


e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sdc
e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
^Ce2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc


As seen from the output above, it looks like it's a bit too late. So I thought one last resort might be to ask for recommendations? Any advice would be appreciated.

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What is the disk formatted as ? If you used it as an external drive in windows, it's most likely in FAT.

Can you see the drive at all from Windows ?

Linux has a lot of applications to try to copy the files, like ddrescue, that, just like dd will copy a drive to another, but it can skip bad sectors, to try them again later. You'll need another drive to hold the image, as big as, or bigger, than your current drive.

Also, if the drive is smaller than 500Gb, you can try Spinrite (not free). It helped me repair some drives in the past.

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  • I have ran Spinrite on 2TB+ drives. It simply takes awhile if there is a problem.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 28, 2013 at 15:21
  • Weird, I've tried it on a 1Tb on multiple machines, and it always crashes at the 500Gb mark. Steve Gibson insists that it is just a bios bug, I don't know if I believe him.
    – Manu
    Aug 29, 2013 at 8:57
  • How dare you question the Bite God that is Steve Gibson! All I know is I ran Spinrite 6 on my 1.5TB HDD without a problem.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 29, 2013 at 10:56
  • Weird, I should make a new question about that. I'm a steve Gibson follower too :) But something seems fishy here.
    – Manu
    Aug 30, 2013 at 8:32

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