How to get Ubuntu to recognize an old Windows 95/98 partitioned hard drive?

Question

Here is my issue:

I have an old 1.6 GB hard drive that has been sitting in the basement for a while. It actually booted up with Windows 95/98 and the when I explored the hard drive it looked like data was still there.

I took out the hard drive and put it in an external hd enclosure and hooked it up to my laptop running 10.04. If I do a:

sudo fdisk -l

The drive doesn't show up. I checked in the Disk Utility and the drive is there but it says it has no partition. I'm pretty sure that it does (as I could see the data when it was still in the pc downstairs).

Any thoughts suggestions on how to get the drive to mount correctly? All I really need is to get some files off of the drive.

UPDATE:

So I'm trying out TestDisk. It appears that there is a read error on just about every cylinder that it's testing though.

Answer 1

You should run Testdisk on the drive to fix its partition table. You can install Testdisk by typing :

sudo apt-get install testdisk

Start testdisk with sudo :

sudo testdisk

And follow the Step-by-Step instructions here : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

It's pretty easy and in no time your disk will be fix and you will be able to mount the partitions.

Answer 2

Try instructions here:

ubuntu help

scroll down to the FAT32 and FAT16 section.