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The Issue

I had a Windows 10 PC whose hard drive went belly up. I'm trying to recover data from it by using an Ubuntu VM through VirtualBox on another Windows 10 PC.

What I've Done

So far, I have:

  1. Installed the damaged hard drive in another PC via a SATA connection.
  2. Created an Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox.
  3. Failed to figure out how to mount the damaged hard drive in Ubuntu.

When I go to Disk Management on the host, it shows the damaged disk as uninitialized (screenshot below):

Uninitialized disk

My understanding is that normally to get a drive to display in an Ubuntu VM, one would need to map the physical hard drive to a virtual disk and add that virtual disk to the VM. I haven't been able to find how to do this, and I especially don't know how to do this when Windows doesn't recognize the drive and doesn't assign it a drive letter.

My Question

Could you please provide step-by-step instructions on how to get my "uninitialized disk" to be mounted/viewable/navigable in my Ubuntu VM? From there, I'm hoping to figure out how to use GNU ddrescue to clone the drive and then TestDisk to extract the data. Thanks!

Software Versions

I am using VirtualBox 6.0.0 r127566 (Qt5.6.2) and running an Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS VM on a Windows 10 host.

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  • For future reference, it might be much easier to simply boot into the "Try Ubuntu" environment of a LiveUSB to conduct your data recovery.
    – user535733
    Dec 28, 2018 at 0:07
  • I thought about that, but I I would like to be able to kick off data recovery in the background and continue working in Windows (the host).
    – Jake Reece
    Dec 28, 2018 at 0:11

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