My disk is broken,i need help to recover it

When i try
Fdisk -l
it gives information on sda,sdb and sdc,but as soon as it needs to scan sdd it doesnt output anything(i waited 10 mins)
as soon as i remove the sdd it finishes scanning

E2fsck -cfpv /dev/sdd
also does nothing. It gives no output at all...
I need the data from the disk,as info of some of my clients is stored there.
And sadly,i'm no expert when it comes to drives
Gpartitioner
shows it as unalocated space,and is unable to write a partition table,and sometimes it doesnt even list sdd.


before it was broken it looked like this
sdd
sdd1 6.5gb ext4 persistence
sdd5 1gb swap no label
a bit unalocated space
(also,can someone explain why swap is listed as sdd5 and not sdd2?)

if this helps you any

thanks in advance,LV

Can't anyone help me?
I got most of the data back by requesting it from my clients again,but i still need the other part

not sure if this will work, but worth a try

dd your sdd to /home/image and run forensics tool on it

if you mount the image mount it as read only

i hope this helps

found this also, might help

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1552484

Thanks mate,as soon as i'm home i'll try it

After more searching,i found redobackup-livecd. It has a nice tool for file recovery,and it sorta worked. I could see the paths on my disks,the files,and i managed to pull of some files,and most of them were files of kali linux itself. But the file i was after,is the one i wasnt able to recover.
Anyway,i noticed strange behaviour when the disk was plugged in.
1.bios failed to load when inserted
2.tools like gparted search for loads of time(i actually only left it 25 mins) searching for volumes
3.even the file recovery tool had problems,with trial and error i was able to find the disk listed (remove disk,put in again at exact time lol)
so what may be the problem on the disk? I want to prevent such things from happening in the future. (apart from holding a backup,wich i,stupid as i was,forgot)
i am puzzled on how it happened,and what actually happened. I've had more response from a disk that fell in water than this one

ANYthing could be the cause. You can buy a brand new disk that fails a month from now. If it is one thing people must come to grips with is that a hard disk can fail at any time for unknown reasons. The bigger question for you is not why it failed, is why u failed at making backups :(

Aerokid,good point. I never knew that. I thought that if you handled your USB thumbdrive with care (e.g not removing it recklessly,not subjecting it to extreme temperatures and moisture,not letting it fall),it wouldn't fail this fast. It's not even a year old lol. I bought it for myself as birthday present.
As to why i failed to make a backup? Because i am stupid at times. The file i needed was the only thing valueable there

lightvader, i think we all slip up from time to time when it comes to backups. Here is another point to add to your possible causes of disk failures; how about a power surge? Or how about a bad usb port that isn't supplying enough or is supplying too much voltage or current? If you know the file type (mp3, pdf, etc) that you are looking for, i think using a disk carving utility like foremost, magicrescue or scalpel is your best bet for recovery. If u want to give it a try, check out my blog post on it.

Foremost

No power surges (i always connect my laptop charger to a surge protector when i'm working) and i have no idea on how to check if my port is delivering too much/not enough current/voltage,but i'll look into that. Thanks for the link man

No problem. Good luck.

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Originally Posted by lightvader

No power surges (i always connect my laptop charger to a surge protector when i'm working) and i have no idea on how to check if my port is delivering too much/not enough current/voltage,but i'll look into that. Thanks for the link man

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