Storage Need linux gurus - External Hard Drive Missing / Broken Partition

Hi,

First things first - I know just above zero about linux.

At work we have a very ancient Dell Blade running linux which was used for doing some CFD runs recently. This is very much a system we don't support as business so there was no automated back-up of the system. There was a clear instruction that if used the data needed to be immediately copied to a machine with backup on. Unfortunately, the sole fool who used to use this blade has recently left and didn't backup some recentish project work - shouldn't have been a problem but someone turned off the server prior to checking it really didn't have anything on it.

Now due to limited internal HDD storage (500GB) an external USB drive was being used (don't ask, this is before i joined to put them straight!) which houses the data. I tried to plug this into a windows machine by assinging a drive letter (but not formatting) said external disk to recover the data as we were planning to scrap the Linux blade now no one left uses it.

This didn't work as its presumably formatted in something windows doesn't like. So I've tried to fumble my way through remounting it in linux (after restarting the server) and it shows two partitions a small 18mb one and the remainder. It however throws an error about partitions not aligned with sectors (or words to that affect).

Did I bork the partitions by assigning a drive letter in windows or is there something I'm not following in linux (SunOS as best I can tell). I'm trying to use TestDisk to restore the partitions to something Linux might recognize again but wanted to pick the hive mind for inspiration.

Ultimately I'm out of my depth! Luckily all the data on the drive is for complete projects but we would rather not loose it in case we need it in the future. Worst comes to worse we can recreate all the runs so its not worth us sending off for expensive data recovery but I'm willing to try a few things first before calling it a loss.

 

Try booting an Ubuntu USB (use Rufus to create it) on a laptop and try connecting the drive through an external enclosure.

 

I've tried to remount the usb drive from within the server but it's throwing a wobbly about the partitions

 

Use lsblk -f to list the drives and what their FSType is or sudo fdisk -l.

When you say "it" throws out an error what exactly is "it", is that when you mounted the partitions or when you're trying to access them?

I assume you're mounting them via...

sudo mount /dev/sdc1 (sdc2, or whatever the device is listed as) /media/usb (< or some other folder you have access to).

 

step No.1 make a copy of the disk before doing anything further (and i mean sector level clone to another hdd/image/whatever)
step No.2+ experiment away

 

Well it doesn't actually show any errors on mounting the partition but it doesn't mount successfully. Inspecting the partitions in the equivalent of diskmanager shows partition 1 as a Microsoft partition type and the 2nd as a Linux partition type (not sure on the actual filesystem). The first has a warning that the sectors and partitions are not aligned (don't have the full warning to hand right now).

I've interpreted this as the windows partition has partly overwritten the Linux partition.

 

Good idea on the cloning