My friend was to send me some files on my external from a windows machine and we were having problems.
He disconnected the drive and sent it back, and now it won't be read on my machine on neither ubuntu/windows partitions.
He said he disconnected while it was checking for drivers but not while transferring files so I don't think it's catastrophic.
I booted into an Ubuntu live disc and while Disks is able to detect the disk as "My Passport" it reports as unallocated and unable to read the partition.
Weirdly: fdisk -l won't show the drive but Disks will detect it no problem.
Using windows, device manager reads the drive as "My Passport" as well but does not show up on file explorer. Disk manager is able to detect the disk but reports the disk as "Unallocated" as well.
I'm guessing the partition table is damaged and data might still be recoverable. It's not terribly important but I'd like to keep it.
Is there a way to get the drive readable again?
Edit: I've been able to recover data from an accidental ext4 to swap formatting via this method: http://shearer.org/Ext4_recovery
Would mkfs.ntfs be a viable option to make the drive readable with data recovery or is it different because of filesystem issues?