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My laptop stopped working suddenly. I would like to clone its hardrive (size 500 gb) before I send it for repairs. The laptop had a dual boot windows/ ubuntu setup with grub bootloader.

To clone the harddrive I wanted to use testdisk.

The problem is when I connect the hard drive to another laptop running Linux Mint it doesn't mount the hard drive.

Using Gparted shows an unallocated 500gb harddrive at /dev/sdb but it cannot mount it.

Running sudo /fdisk -l gives the following output.

enter image description here

Then I tried fsck /dev/sdb and the output is as follows.

enter image description here

Finally I tried dmesg|tail and I got the following output.

enter image description here

At this point I am out op options. I would appreciate any help/suggestions/comments. Please let me know if you need more clarifications.

Thank you

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  • fsck /dev/sdb attempts to repair the entire disk, but fsck should be used on a filesystem, such as /dev/sdb1. If you attempted the same with mount, you'd run into a similar issue. Also, TestDisk is a data recovery tool, not a disk-cloning tool. For cloning your disk, you'd do better with dd or Clonezilla.
    – Rod Smith
    Jun 4, 2015 at 23:53

2 Answers 2

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Try a data recovery tool like ddrescue to recover each partition or the entire disk.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue

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ddrescue is a cloning tool, not a data recovery one.

Use ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. The latest is more recent than ddrescue and offers some benefits, but it currently has a much lower base of users who tested it.

So, as this is your first attempt, I would suggest you using ddrescue with a logfile. Clone the whole drive /dev/sdX or the partition containing the data /dev/sdXn that you'll attempt to recovery later.

Be careful to read the documentation very carefully before using ddrescue as doing mistakes may loose your data forever if you mixes the drives. You can use hdparm -I /dev/sdX | less to double check that you're not mixing input and output drives ; check the model and serial number of each.

If the cloning process hits bad sectors and becomes very slow, you can play with ddrescue's parameters, like setting -i to skip bad areas, -n to avoid splitting in the first pass, a.s.o. Understanding reverse cloning is important too.

Utilities like fsck or chkdsk are more oriented to repair small errors in file systems, but if the drive is defective, they can do more harm than good.

It might also be cheaper calling a company specialized in data recovery as this is daily routine for them. Mine would ask about 300 USD for a successful logical data recovery of such drive. Data recovery companies have better equipment (hardware imagers, more powerful softwares, ...) and experience but I also understand if you want to try it yourself.

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