Laptop Unbootable - Drive Shows As Uninitialised

[johng]

Yes DD = Destroyer of Data   you must be extremely careful and understand  which disc is  input and which is output.

 

I had some good results with "Testdisk"

 

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[JetsetBkk]

5 hours ago, jackdd said:

You don't need to mount it to copy it (which would of course not be possible of there is a problem with the partition table).

In Linux you can copy the raw data of a device without mounting a partition, see the link which i posted previously.

If the HDD isn't working at all this will of course also not get you any further.

 

4 hours ago, Tayaout said:

Before you connect via Linux you can run:

sudo journalctl -f

<snip>

 

I'm now convinced that the disk is dead. What Windows and Linux showed or did when the SATA-USB Bridge box was connected, was simply the O/S communicating with the box via the PC's USB port.

 

I did use another disk in the box and it worked OK - the disk was detected by both Windows and Linux.

 

I also removed the disk from the box to see how Windows and Linux would behave with no disk present:

Linux behaved the same - when I click on the "USB 3.0" icon, "Unable to mount location" was displayed.

Windows behaved the same - in Disk Management, attempting to initialize the "Unknown disk" resulted in "The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error."

 

So the PC reacted the same, whether the disk was in the box or not - running either Windows and Linux.

 

But the final test was when I removed the disk from the box and connected it directly to a SATA port on the motherboard: the BIOS didn't show the disk.

 

Thanks again for all suggestions. 

 

 

[JetsetBkk]

5 hours ago, johng said:

Yes DD = Destroyer of Data   you must be extremely careful and understand  which disc is  input and which is output.

 

I had some good results with "Testdisk"

 

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I have used Testdisk before, many many years ago, but it needs a disk to be at least detected by the BIOS. ????