Testdisk can't find any partitions anymore

joen93 · 07-22-2013, 12:21 AM

Dear forum,

I don't have much experience in Linux and I really could use your help because I need to recover a lot of important files.

A few days ago my university alienware laptop with windows7 crashed and the partition went RAW.
I booted a ubuntu live usb which recognized it as NTFS, so I started to copy my files with testdisk to an external hard drive.

While doing this I didn't notice that my laptop's battery was almost empty and it went in standby. When I powered it back on with the ac adapter it went from bad to worse:
The ubuntu disk uitilty doesn't recognize the partition types anymore and labels its type as "unkown" and testdisk gives a lot of read errors and can't find any partions anymore, not in quick search nor in deeper search.

I really need a lot of university files from this harddrive and would appreciate any help.

Screenshot of disk utility:

the partitions used to be:
(no label) OEM partition - I think it was FAT || RECOVERY - NTFS || OS - NTFS

Screenshot of testdisk results (same for deeper search):

Kustom42 · 07-22-2013, 05:02 PM

That sounds brutal dude.

Well you can do a dd to do a raw data dump but that won't help you mount the drive if it's not being recoginized. What happened with the windows chkdisk that shouldve ran automatically? Did it fail when trying to repair the errors on your drive?

joen93 · 07-22-2013, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kustom42

What happened with the windows chkdisk that shouldve ran automatically? Did it fail when trying to repair the errors on your drive?

As soon as windows loaded the chkdisk on startup after selecting my OS, it ended up in a endless black screen. I know that loading windows repair can take a while so I waited a good 2 hours, but nothing popped up.
This might be because I used to have a Windows 8 partition on it in dual boot which -correct if I'm wrong- replaced my windows 7 bootmanager and probably screwed windows repair too.

I did a hard drive test with the built in "alienware" system diagnostics by dell, and got this Hard drive failure error:

Code:

** Hard Drive 0 - DST Short Test **
Test Results : Fail
Error Code 2000-0151
Validation 57863
Msg: Hard Drive 0 - S/N 5WS1RAPQ, incorrect status = 3E
No additional sense information

I'm going to buy a new hard drive just to be sure, but I'd like to get my data back anyway of course

.

I'm not sure if this will worke because I have no experience with ddrescue or knoppix, but after googling a bit I thought that this Damaged Hard Disk guide with knoppix and ddrescue might work. I've got a hard drive of 1TB with which I could try this.

Should I try this or rather do something else?
Thanks in advance