I got an external hard drive enclosure for the purpose of recovering some of the files from my old laptops hard drive. The hard drive and all of it’s partitions show up in both disks and gparted but it wont mount. When I tried to mount it manually, it gave the error message stating that it can’t read the superblock. I’ve never had to deal with this issue before, so the only things I’ve tried so far were fsck and the data recovery option in GParted, and neither of them helped.

I tried searching about it online but all of the solutions I found online either didn’t work or required methods that are currently not possible for me. The hard drive had Ubuntu (22.04 if I remember correctly) installed on it and I just need access to the files in the sdd3 partition, which was formatted in ext4.

    •  aard   ( @aard@kyu.de ) 
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      16 months ago

      After reading about it - true. Disadvantage of doing this stuff for a long time - you miss new developments. Only reason I’m aware of testdisk is that I lost the sources of my own superblock search tool, my old binaries broke with a newer glibc, and before reimplementing it I checked if sombody else had done that in a more usable form in the meantime.