PSA: Always boot from a Linux USB before writing data to a dead drive

I had a client's drive that wouldn't show up in Windows Disk Management at all last week, so I was about to tell them it was toast. Decided to pop in a Mint live USB on a whim and the drive mounted perfectly - turned out it was just a corrupted partition table from a failed update. Has anyone else had a drive totally vanish in one OS but work fine in another like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivanb413d ago

Booted up an old laptop once where Windows would blue screen every time I plugged in the external drive. Popped in a Ubuntu USB and the drive showed up no problem. Turns out Windows just didn't like the way the drive was formatted, it was some weird Linux filesystem leftover from a previous owner. Saved me from tossing a perfectly good 1TB drive in the trash. Windows is dramatic like that sometimes.

finleythomas2d ago

Did you ever figure out what filesystem it actually was, like ext4 or something else? I had a similar thing happen with a 2TB drive that showed up as raw in Windows, but it was just formatted with an old version of FAT32 that Windows decided it didn't like... popped it into an Ubuntu live USB and it read everything perfectly, just had to copy the files off and reformat it to NTFS. It's funny how Linux just doesn't care about that stuff, it'll read almost anything you throw at it. That drive has been running fine for years now after I gave it a proper Windows friendly format...