My 320gb external HDD stopped working properly. I can mount it but there is only an empty "lost & found" directory on it. I am 99.9999999999999% sure that I did not format the drive when doing a reinstall of Kubuntu on my system's internal HDD.

Testdisk shows :

Disk /dev/sdb - 320 GB / 298 GiB - CHS 38914 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
* Linux 0 1 1 38912 254 63 625137282

This partition mounts but it only contains a "lost & found" directory, which is empty. I have done a deep search with testdisk and can't find anything else.

Photorec instantly lists all of my missing directories and I am sure that I could recover everything but this will take a long time (over a 100 hours) .... I am not unhappy about the time but it seems silly to do this if I can recover everything on the disk and keep it as is. I would then transfer what I need from the ext. HDD.

Where do I go from here?

Thanks

Hi,

Firstly, I would image it to another device using dd.

You can then attempt data recovery from that image and avoid further damage to the HDD.

I have no experience with ext3 undeletion tools, but they do seem to exist! http://code.google.com/p/ext3grep/

Looks like you might have some luck with that one, otherwise its back to file-system independent recovery tools such as Magic Rescue http://www.student.dtu.dk/~s042078/magicrescue/

HTH, Good luck!

zer0x