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I connected my external HDD to my TV and the TV did not recognize it. After that I can't open it on my computer any more.

I tried fsck which kept asking more and more questions. Fearing that I would make the data impossible to retrieve by giving wrong answers (y/n), I stopped in the middle. The error message has changed since (it used to be about invalid fs type)

It wouldn't open on Windows either (Win 7 on VM). I believe the original format was NTFS

Current error:

Error mounting /dev/sdb1 at /media/[username omitted]/28bc82aa-d4bd-459e-b071-16839167a6da: Command-line `mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sdb1" "/media/.../28bc82aa-d4bd-459e-b071-16839167a6da"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: /dev/sdb1: can't read superblock

The data is very important to me and I don't have any other copy of some of it

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  • What does fdisk -l output? How many partitions are there on the hard drive? It may just be the first one causing the trouble (which is a problem if it only has one partition).
    – Wilf
    Nov 24, 2013 at 14:03
  • Two partitions - the second one is fine
    – lfk
    Nov 25, 2013 at 11:54
  • I think the first issue right now is that the OS thinks its filesystem is ext4 whereas the filesystem is NTFS
    – lfk
    Nov 25, 2013 at 11:55
  • If that is the case you may just need to use mount - added it to my answer.
    – Wilf
    Nov 25, 2013 at 13:38

2 Answers 2

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Since filesystem manipulation causes always risk of data loss I recommend to make a backup before doing anything else: Data-Recovery: Imaging a damaged device, filesystem or drive

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Manually mounting the file-system should work - just use the mount command:

It uses these parameters: mount -t type device dir

So run this:

mount -t ntfs DEVICE_LOCATION PLACE_TO_MOUNT_IT

Here is an example:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt

For more information run man mount

Check it with GParted - sudo apt-get install gparted then gparted. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

This will show the formatting of your disk, and whether it has any data on it - it can also repair the disk if necessary.

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Backing it to an image would also be a good idea.

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