Jay,
Sorry about my previous post, I am noticing some inconsistent behavior. Seems that I must make sure the USB is plugged into the laptop running Ubuntu AFTER the external drive case is turned on.
So I reran testdisk (as root) and I it brings up a screen warning to ensure the capacity of the drive was correctly determined before proceeding...and it does NOT determine the correct drive capacity...so I canceled. It determined the manufacturer and model number correctly but it thinks it is 2199GB...which is the same size as what I found in the dmesg output.

JimI8,
I did not do anything that may have written just yet (at least not that I know of :-) Also, it looks as if the photoRec starts out using testdisk as the output is exactly the same (up to the Capacity Warning point).

Thank you both for all help, advice, and warnings...I know my data could be jeopardised if I make a mistake.
Any ideas as to why the OS thinks it's the wrong sized drive?

imazman

Looks depressingly like failure of the controller hardware inside the disk. But it is bizarre that the other disk is similarly afflicted (have you done the same sort of checks on that?). I can only think of a power spike hitting both disks. Stupidly I once connected the PSU to the m/board while it was switched on, and destroyed the disk.

Do you have a healthy desktop PC where you can try the same diagnostics with the disk attached directly via the IDE cable? Then you could also try the manufacturer's diagnostics as suggested above, assuming the disk is even recognised.

I assume all recovery software at least depends on having access to the disk as a raw device. You can try to read the raw device with the linux dd command. For example, something like

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/username/mbr bs=512 count=1

should copy the 512 byte master boot record at the start of the disk to the specified file.

Incidentally, dmesg is showing the sector count (that big number) as 2^32, or 256*256*256*256. Not very encouraging.

So far, to me it looks like one of two possible cases.

1) HDD partitions are damaged or destroyed ... only hope is testdisk and foremost
2) HDD is dead ... only hope is professional recovery in the clean room (costly)

I don't think diagnosing it further would be a good idea. I would have recommended running 'smartctl' tests on it, but as the drive is likely near death anyway, doing so may kill it completely. So instead, if testdisk has failed, use foremost to dump all jpg and png and whatever other image types you had from it to a good disk. Next time, backup to external media ... CDs, DVDs, BDs

H_TeXMeX_H,
Thanks for your suggestions and advice. As root, I tried testdisk and yes it failed. I also tried, as root, foremost and it too failed. In fact, I tried to do a dd and it failed too. I couldn't even read the MBR using dd. Here are a few sample outputs from the commands.

root@gateway1-laptop:~# dd if=/dev/sdb of=~/Desktop/diskMbr count=1 bs=512
dd: reading `/dev/sdb': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.0822624 s, 0.0 kB/s

root@gateway1-laptop:~# foremost -o ~/Desktop/recovery/ -t all -i /dev/sdb
Processing: /dev/sdb
||
root@gateway1-laptop:~#

root@gateway1-laptop:~# dd if=/dev/sdb of=~/Desktop/diskMbr count=1 bs=512
dd: reading `/dev/sdb': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.0822624 s, 0.0 kB/s

I pretty much exhausted all suggestions, I assume I will have to send this out to have the data professionally extracted. Can anyone suggest and other options, or can anyone suggest a reputable data retrieval company.

Tx,
imazman

You can try switching the jumpers around. Primary to slave and so on, on the off-chance something might get unwedged, but that's getting pretty desperate.

There may be specialised disk diagnostic tools around - something like the Ultimate Boot CD -

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

or from the disk manufacturers themselves - that would be worth a try. Sorry - don't know anything specific.

It sounds like your disk is mechanically OK. Hopefully that will be in your favour if you send it off for data extraction. Anyway, best of luck.

The only other possible things to suggest is try it while connected internally via IDE or SATA. Check the cables to make sure they are ok. If all that checks out, the drive is likely dead.