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.
That’s one of the solutions I saw that I currently can’t do because I have no other device that I can use for that.
You can do all of that on the device - but you only get one shot. If you mess up that’s it - so no sensible person would try any form of data rescue directly on the device. Storage is cheap, if you don’t have sufficient space on your computer just get another external disk.
I know you wont understand where I’m coming from so I wont bother explaining it. If I need another storage device than I’ll just have to wait until next year to get another storage device.
Edit: I don’t understand why I’m getting downvoted but it proves to me that I made the right choice in not explaining my situation.
In that case I’d recommend waiting until next year before attempting recovery.
You can decide yourself if the data in that disk is more valuable than the price of a new disk to store the backup image. If it’s not that valuable I guess you can one-shot it.