Tutorial on how to successfully recover data from a Severely Corrupted hard drive in Ubuntu Linux using Testdisk and Photorec. A “professional” repair shop attempted recovery of data from this Windows Laptop drive, but failed. Using Testdisk in Linux I recovered about 70% of the drive. (Could have been more, but it was crippling my system and running horrifically slow) sudo apt-get install smartmontools sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends smartmontools Find out drive number with GUI tools, Gparted, or “fdisk -l” sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdx sudo testdisk /dev/sdx Take a backup image if you have enough disk space spare on your system sudo photorec image.dd (or /dev/sdx) find . -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" -o -iname "*.png" \) -exec cp '{}' /destination/ \; Wallpaper: http://quidsup.net/?i=NeonPacman