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Normally I am a Windows user and when my external hard drive crashed, I wanted to use the back up. Unfortunately this one was not detected and I could only find it in the Disk Manager. Here I was asked to initialize it which would mean a loss of the data. It was suggested that using Ubuntu might be a solution. So I installed Version 22.04.2 on another laptop. Here it is found when I use gnome-disk but not under lsblk. Is there any chance to save my data without having to use professional help?

Bianka Kesler
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    I guess your backup is not a "backup". How do you create the backup? – Marco Jun 02 '23 at 15:29
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    Windows normally turns fast startup on for all NTFS partitions. That sets hibernation flag & prevents the Linux NTFS driver from normally mounting. You may be able to manually mount read only, if you create a mount point first. https://askubuntu.com/questions/843153/unable-to-mount-windows-10-partition-it-is-in-an-unsafe-state & https://askubuntu.com/questions/145902/unable-to-mount-windows-ntfs-filesystem-due-to-hibernation – oldfred Jun 02 '23 at 21:53
  • Welcome to the Ask Ubuntu community. Please edit your question to include the version of the Ubuntu OS that you're using, as that will help in diagnosing your issue. Thanks. – richbl Jun 03 '23 at 00:11

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There is a utility in the Ubuntu repositories called TestDisk. Credits to this answer.

Here is an overview:

TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks.

It is very useful in forensics, recovering lost partitions. It works with :

  • DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
  • NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP )
  • Linux Ext2 and Ext3
  • BeFS ( BeOS )
  • BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
  • CramFS (Compressed File System)
  • HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
  • JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
  • Linux Raid
  • Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
  • LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
  • Netware NSS
  • ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
  • Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
  • UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
  • XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

To install it run the following commands in a terminal: sudo apt update followed by sudo apt install testdisk

The documentation can be found here

It can also recover various files such as photos etc using the PhotoRec facility which is included, please consult the documentation.

There are more versions (Windows, Mac, Arch etc) to download here.

Raffles
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