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TheGasolineWillBeOurs

Member

Registered: 2015-02-06

Posts: 65

Externally attached laptop SSD: No medium found

Dear all

My laptop had a bad accident. The screen is broken and I don't know what else might be broken. Naturally, the only thing I care about is the SSD drive, i.e. the data on it. I removed it from the broken laptop and attached it to another laptop via USB/SATA III cable. Once I plug it in, I can see /dev/sdb showing up, but no partitions. I tried accessing the disk with various utilities, but all failed:

fdisk -l /dev/sdb
fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdb: No medium found

testdisk /dev/sdb                                                                                                                            1 
TestDisk 7.1, Data Recovery Utility, July 2019
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org

Unable to open file or device /dev/sdb: No medium found

lsblk /dev/sdb
[no output]

It seems to me that this disk is broken beyond repair. Any idea how I could recover any data on it?

Edit: Not sure if it's important, but I used GPT on that disk, not MBR.

Last edited by TheGasolineWillBeOurs (2020-12-19 11:27:33)

d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,687

Re: Externally attached laptop SSD: No medium found

It is probably difficult to give advice since SSD's are more 'unknown' than the regular platter drives. I would give it to the pros if data is crucial.

TheGasolineWillBeOurs

Member

Registered: 2015-02-06

Posts: 65

Re: Externally attached laptop SSD: No medium found

Thanks. I do have a backup, but still a few days of data lost.

I didn't make any progress on this matter in the past days, so I guess letting the pros look at it might be my last resort. I doubt they can recover much, though?

d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,687

Re: Externally attached laptop SSD: No medium found

I doubt they can recover much, though?

It's difficult to know with flash drives. At least with platter disk one knows how data is embedded. Cross fingers things can be recovered.