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I had a external USB SATA formatted with FAT32, which is dead, with documents, photos, etc. I changed the PCB of the drive and now at least is spinning and making some noise.

Now I'm plugging it into my openSUSE linux (with a SATA quickport XT) but nothing happens.

The USB is mounted in /dev/sdb

I tried the following:

# mount /dev/sdb /mnt 
mount: /dev/sdb: can't read superblock


# fsck /dev/sdb
fsck de util-linux 2.25.1
e2fsck 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

# smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sdb  smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [x86_64-linux-3.16.7-7-desktop] (SUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-14,
Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org Read Device
Identity failed: Invalid argument

Reading this web page I think I ruined the partition with this command... Yes, I'm fool enough to execute commands without understanding at all! :(

# sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdb
mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
¡/dev/sdb es todo el dispositivo, no sólo una partición!
¿Continuar de todas formas? (s,n) s
Se está creando El sistema de ficheros con 244190646 4k bloques y 61054976 nodos-i

UUID del sistema de ficheros: e986eb08-a919-4fe8-98f3-30cc8ff49572
Respaldo del superbloque guardado en los bloques: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
        102400000, 214990848

But anyway, hard drive still is not recognized, fsck is not working.

Now I have fear. I don't want to lose the data, I want to recover it.

What can I do?

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    Well, normally I'd say just restore from backup, but I'm guessing that tou wouldn't be asking this if you had your data backed up. Your other option is to send your drive off to a data recovery company, but that is going to be quite expensive.
    – EEAA
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:19
  • Excatly, this disk was my backup... I'm going to try things carefully before I quit... The disk is important personally, but I heard that usually a data recovery company cost a lot of money and that is not my intention.. thank you anyway
    – Aitor
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:35

1 Answer 1

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Try to run fdisk -l /dev/sdb to see if the partitions are valid. If so, you could be trying to access the wrong partition (/dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1). If the partition are valid and you are acessing the wrong one, you could try to access the correct one instead.

But if the partitions are not valid, I don't think you will be able to recover anything from this drive in the current state. Using a data recovery program (or company) could recover some data from it, but if the partition is damaged, probably the disk is damaged as well.

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  • Oh.. Well... This is hard.. I guess that next time I'll read three times every command I put when trying recovery a hard disk... thank you anyway.. but the command run so fast that I had hope that some magical command could revert the format
    – Aitor
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:39
  • If you read the man pages (man mke2fs), you can see what they do before executing a potentially destructive command. They usually tells you if the command will read the disk or write data.
    – ThoriumBR
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:41
  • Ok.. I'm reading now and says that -n causes mke2fs to not actually create a filesystem, but display what it would do if it were to create a filesystem. This can be used to determine the location of the backup superblocks for a particular filesystem, so long as the mke2fs parameters that were passed when the filesystem was originally created are used again. Maybe there's some hope?
    – Aitor
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:44
  • I edited the question, probably you can still have hope.
    – ThoriumBR
    Feb 20, 2015 at 18:55
  • WEll. you're rigth, it's a massive hardware failure.. fdisk -l /dev/sdb fdisk: fdisk: unable to read /dev/sdb: Input/output error
    – Aitor
    Feb 20, 2015 at 19:04

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