Recovering a failed (SSD) hard drive. Unknown partition type.

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 8:02 PM, linux guy <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any way to sniff out the old partition table ?    What would
> I need other than the partition table sizes ?    I know I had boot,
> swap and / partitions...

Try testdisk.  It will attempt to identify and restore partitions on a disk.

It's in the Fedora repo, just "yum install testdisk".

> Is there any way to copy (and possibly recover) the raw data from the
> drive ?  Possibly using dd or something ?

When you install testdisk it will also install photorec, an
application that will attempt to identify and restore all files it can
recognize on an otherwise borked disk.  It's probably your best bet if
testdisk fails.

Both testdisk and photorec have menu-driven text interfaces that are
fairly intuitive to use, but there's plenty of information to be found
with your favorite search engine if you get stuck.

> I tried using partimage, but as you guys know, if there is no
> partition (partition table), it can't copy it.
>
> What are the chances that if I could recover the partition table that
> the data would still be there ?

There's really no way to tell.  Everything might be intact, or it
could be totally FUBAR.  It all depends on exactly how your drive is
damaged and to what extent.

I'm sure SSDs fail in new and exciting ways we could never dream of
with spinning platters.  ;-)

> Aside: this caught me TOTALLY off guard.  SMART was enabled for this
> drive, the drive was checked periodically, etc.   This laptop hadn't
> moved off my desk in months and was basically only rebooted to run
> newer kernels.

I know next to nothing about SSDs, but perhaps SMART isn't that smart
about them yet?  ;-)  Some of the data exposed in SMART that I'm aware
of doesn't seem like it's that relevant with SSDs.

-T.C.