# Recovering Data From Damaged, Failing or Formatted Hard Drive

I had some friends reach out to me recently after their external backup hard drive had stopped working. After trying some Windows tools and some utilities in Hiren's Boot CD I decided to take one last attempt using a Ubuntu 20.02 flash drive and some Linux utilities......was I successful?

## Commands Used for Reference

- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
- sudo apt-get install testdisk
- sudo dpkg -i ./testdisk_7.1-5_amd64.deb
- sudo fdisk -l
- sudo testdisk /path/to/storage/device
- sudo photorec /path/to/storage/device