how to mount hard drives for data recovery in ubuntu

Question

I try to mount a hard drive in Ubuntu and get the following error:

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0). 
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing. 
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error 
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error 
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a 
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows 
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very 
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate 
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g. 
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation 
for more details. 
Failed to sync device /dev/sdb3: Input/output error 
Failed to close volume /dev/sdb3: Input/output error

A friend of mine mounted the drive on their MacBook and they were able to read the data on it and copy it off without any problems.

My question is... how can I do data recovery like that in Ubuntu? Or are Macs the OS of choice for data recovery professionals?

Solution

Your disk have a problem in the NTFS filesystem. Ubuntu has a partial support for NTFS filesystems. You have to install the ntfs-3g package:

 sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

The tool you should use is ntfsfix, so after installing the package you can attach the disk to your pc, get the device id (you your example is /dev/sdb3) and run, for example,

 sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdb3

Anyway be very carefull when doing this kind of operations, loosing all the data is a big risk. For more information read the man page:

 man ntfsfix