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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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My hard drive not showing up.

February 13th, 2018, 5:28

My hard drive shows up in lsusb (it says western digital). However it does not show up using sudo fdisk -l. I think it may be corrupt the file system is ext3(not readable in windows). I cannot see it under dev/devices. It does not show up as sda. How do I perform a data recovery

Re: My hard drive not showing up.

February 13th, 2018, 10:43

you could try using HDDSuperClone and if you get an image, perform data recovery on it using software like r-studio.
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

Re: My hard drive not showing up.

February 13th, 2018, 19:39

If the drive is not showing up at all with the sudo fdisk -l command, and is not showing up at all in /dev/, then there is a bigger problem then a corrupt file system, or even bad sectors. If it was just a corrupt file system or bad sectors, it would still show up as a /dev/sd_ when trying to list drives, even if the partitions were not recognized. All you are able to see is that it detects the USB is connected. Unfortunately HDDSuperClone cannot help if the drive does not show up at all as a block device. FYI another command you can use to see if a new drive appears is lsblk.

If the drive is actually a SATA drive with a USB adapter board connected to it, then it could be hooked up directly to a SATA port to see if it would work. But if it is a native USB board on the drive, there is not much you can do on your own. Does the drive spin up? Does the drive make any clicking noises? Has it been dropped?

Re: My hard drive not showing up.

February 15th, 2018, 10:08

lsblk command seems clearer and simpler. Thanks for the tip.

Re: My hard drive not showing up.

February 15th, 2018, 16:52

Run "dmesg" (as root if necessary or with sudo or su), to see what the kernel actually says when you plug it in, or during boot, you might get some error messages there that explain more about the situation.
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