Fixing a corrupted USB drive

[TwiNight]

I know that there are numerous threads for this type of problem - which exactly is the problem. I am very confused as to which one corresponds to my problem.

So , to begin, I have a 500 GB external HDD. I recently damaged it somehow while using it with Arch Linux (I don't know exactly what caused it). Now, KDE doesn't mount it automatically. Whenever I try 'mount' command I get message as :

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

In windows I get:

The drive needs to be formatted before using it with Windows

SO I would like to restore the HDD WITHOUT LOSING ANY DATA ON IT.

I know of the

dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=image.

command. But since the size of this HDD is 500GB it's not possible to fit the image on native linux partition.

So what should I do? I apologize for the redundant nature of this post. But, I can't afford to lose almost 200 GB of data without trying anything.

Here's the output of "fdisk -l"

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500079525888 bytes
223 heads, 33 sectors/track, 132724 cylinders, total 976717824 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000320d1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 2048 976717823 488357888 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

In case the output is messed up,

Device=/dev/sdc1
Boot=<NA>
Start=2048
End=976717823
Blocks=488357888
Id=7
System=HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

[atreyu]

According to your fdisk output, it seems as if there is one partition on your external disk, seen by the Linux OS as sdc1 (which means it is the first partition of the third disk presented to your system). Furthermore, it appears as though it is formatted with the newer version of NTFS (a Windows file system introduced years ago to improve FAT/FAT32) - at least that is how the partition is marked. Many Linux distros do not included support for NTFS in their kernel, but some do.

To find out, try the following command. It will make a directory mount point, and attemp to mount the partition read-only using the NTFS file system:

mkdir -p /mnt/usbdisk
mount -v -o ro -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdisk

If that works, great (you can verify with the df command). If not, your best bet is to boot the system with a "Live" Linux recovery CD/DVD that has NTFS included (there are surely several - haven't looked) and access your data that way. You still have the problem of where to put your 200GB of data though.