Unreadable External hard drive

[Varmint]

Hey guys,

I have a 1TB external hard drive that was full of stuff, but today it just stopped working. On windows, the hard drive would refuse to open up and was labelled as "Local disk" instead of its usual name, and said "you have to format this drive before using it". It booted fine on Ubuntu, however, so I thought it was an MBR issue.

Using DOS fixmbr did not work. TestDisk said that there was a bad sector count. Checkdisk keeps checking it for consistency every time I boot up.

Now, even Ubuntu says that it is an unknown filesystem.

What do I do? Is the data lost? Active Partition can read the data but doesn't allow me to back it up or anything else.

[oolon]

Hmmm, Its looking that way, do you have a bigger blank disk? i.e. could you copy it to another? What have done in the past to rescue partitions is to use dd_rescue* under Linux to lift as much data as i could from the drive into a huge file. Then attempt to mount/check/copy the data off that. Don't forget if you have a failing drive checking the disk may cause more problems as it tries to write fixes to damaged areas.

* I did a log of all the failed reads and retried just the bad bits, several times to get as much off the disk as I could.