Need help recovering data from USB drive

kahlil88 · 12-29-2007, 12:07 AM

I was moving files off my USB hard drive and got some I/O read errors (skipped the bad files) and then my drive disappeared from the desktop. GParted sees it as an unformatted drive, but it's ext2.

I have no experience with file recovery, so I need to know how to save my files. The files were originally on my main hard drive, but I couldn't install Ubuntu without reformatting, so I put them on the external drive.

unSpawn · 12-29-2007, 05:39 AM

There's more than a few threads about file recovery on Linuxquestions.org. Please search because most of them outline in detail what you should do. In short: 0) stop using it and 'umount' the USB HD, 1) make an image of the whole USB HD with 'dd' (or try 'dcfldd', 'ddrescue', 'dd_rescue' or 'rdd' if there's too many errors), 2) use 'photorec' or 'foremost' on the copied image of the USB HD.