Awhile back I was starting up a server and trying to copy an IDE drive over to a SCSI. I was successful, but then the scsi crashed, unrecoverably. I got a SATA, installed ubuntu and attempted to remount that old IDE, now it won't mount, says it is "ee GPT". I took the IDE drive out and put it in an enclosure to check it out on my win7 machine. Again, Win7 detects it, but does not give it a drive letter, also says there is nothing on the drive (I went to My computer -> Manage -> Storage) I have options to convert to MBR or Dyanmic.

Is there anyway to get the data off this thing?! This is a disaster, I was trying to backup this stuff! Was the partition overwritten or was the table corrupted?

At first, try to restore the partition table using Testdisk. It may be possible that Testdisk is even able to mount the disk.
If that doesn't work you can try to use Photorec (part of the Testdisk package) to recover files.

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Yes there may be a way...but in your case, it's a loooooong shot

- get a live CD (for this challenge, I always use Knoppix)
- bolt the drive in a box, any ol' box
- boot that box up with Knoppix (pop the CD in the drive and...hey, you know this...)
- in the menu (several items) choose "shell"
- enter "su -" to get into root mode
- enter "fdisk -l" and cross your fingers
- if you get the disk in the list, it'll possibly be listed as /dev/sda , among other drive-like stuff (diskdrives, sticks, DVDroms...)
- try this "mount /dev/sda /media"
- and then "cd /media"
- hit ls to look if there's someone home...

you mau need to mount a stick in the system as well to act as a receiving medium...of course

If you've got success, and the stick is mounted, fire up Midnight Compmander (enter mc to do that) and shuttle stuff over to the stick

Good luck, and I mean that...

Thor

The testdisk worked beautifully. Just turned out my partition table had been overwritten in someway. I just rewrote the partition table and restarted the drive (on/off). Win7 recognized it, I stuck in my ubuntu server and it recognized it right off, mounted like it was supposed to (ntfs-3g!).

Thanks so much!

Nice that it worked for you. Please mark the thread as solved using the thread tools at the top of the thread.