Installation of necessary toolsĮither you are using a bootable Live system like KNOPPIX that is shipped with all tools needed, or install them manually on your machine: The amount of possible lost data is approximately 40 GB of pictures/videos and 1 GB of documents like.

“The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?” Of course, Windows nor Ubuntu is able to mount the disk anymore and the Disk Manager displays the first primary partition as RAW, with Windows prompting: OMG! A friend dropped a 2 TB WD elements external harddrive while it was connected to the PC with active write operations. Follow the steps below only if your data is not crucial to you. I take no responsibility for the loss of any data.

This is my take on recovering data from my friends broken hard drive. Warranty: I am not a professional in data recovery. I had to recover data from a broken external hard drive and my typical go to recovery software failed ( TestDisk), because the disk’s hardware was severely damaged. Introduction to Data Recovery with free Unix Tools

Testdisk 7.2 download