12 April, 2015

My Dying External HDD... revived – by Ubuntu Linux

Tux, the Linux penguin
Tux, the Linux penguin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
12-April-2015



In my years of computing, the volume of data that I have to keep grew lineary, sometimes exponentially, downloads here and there, documents piling up from transactions day in and day out. Naturally, an external HDD was required.

I bought a WD 1.5TB size, and it was immediately put to use.

It was big and heavy, and bulky, so when the remaining size in my internal HDD was enough to hold my daily space requirement, then the external HDD was disconnected and kept away.

And that was bad. The storage time was quite long, so by the time I needed to use it again, errors came up. Of course, this was all in Windows.

I tried using chkdsk to fix the error, and with a 1.5TB size, the time it took to repairing entailed long hours, and I had to leave it running overnight, but in the morning, the repair was still not done.

I had to abort, and to some point in time, that helped.

Until Windows had to give up on the chkdsk repair. I mean, today, I tried doing another repair for a very important file that I need, it didn't go through.

So I booted up in Ubuntu Linux, and used GParted to fix and repair the external HDD, and that somehow went through. Most importantly, the drive appeared in the list, and when I clicked on it, the files were shown. Not all of it, but the one I needed, I found, and copied out.

As one forum commentator said, “Way to go!” Reverse-engineer a Windows program and use it in Linux to repair a disk that can't be repaired in Windows! Of course, he is referring to fsck, and another utility.

Anyway, my external HDD is still okay after all, only that it can be accessed through Ubuntu Linux, not through Windows.

I might stick with Ubuntu Linux more often. This article is written and posted using Ubuntu Linux.

Till then!


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