I have and esata drive that I mounted to linux using an esata-usb cable. I see that sdb is available usning dmesg but the 3 partitions sdb1, sdb2 and sdb3 are not available. Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table


When I tried to mount I get an error that the superblock is corrupted. I tried to run fsck -p /dev/sdb on the HD and I get this:
Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
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 <device>

Next I tried to get the superblocks with mkfs -n /dev/sdb and it fails - so I do not know the bacup superblocks.

I tried to run e2fsck using these standard superblock numbers but these commands also fail. so at this stage, I am unable to access these partitions - I know I had 3 partitions - one for linux and one for swap and third for data. Is there any way I can savlage the data partitions.

Thanks a lot for any assistance anyone can provide.

Sanjeev Taran






dumpe2fs /dev/sda2

This is a great tool to help http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Tried this - the problem is that the disk does not show up on windows or linux. I am using the esata-usb cable with the drive, the drive is not spinning.
Thanks for your reply.
-ST

That would worry me...is it an external thing? Check the power supply. Had that on my Prestige too. No spin-up.

Eh, just thinking out loud...got cool music here too...

Thor

You say the drive in not showing up, but, in you initial post you indicated that you were able to run fdisk against it, albeit with a erroneous result. Testdisk can be run against the raw disk just like you did with fdisk. It does not have to show up as a mounted partition (if that's what you mean?).

On Windows: I tried testdisk on windows.The drive is not showing up on the windows platform.
On linux I see sdb but not the sdb1, sdb2 and sdb3 partitions. fdisk on linux does not show the partitions - hence the error on linux

Both cases, I do not hear any spin.

Thanks for your responses.
-ST

What does the output of dmesg show and lshw (if installed)