firstly, thanks for the rescue remix. I was feeling brave and went ahead and installed the latest Ubuntu release as well.

I'm new to linux and all the terminal commands and mounting etc etc. its all very weird to me

anyway, I installed the latest Ubuntu on a 250gb drive that I have. everything installed fine

the purpose of the installation was to try recover some data off a 320gb drive that I have had lying around for a VERY long time. I have heard the power of ddrescue and wanted to put it to the test, limited linux knowledge and all

I decided to follow this guide http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how...ve-is-damaged/

I followed it to the T, and during the first step all THREE drives picked up. The OS drive, the screwed drive and a 1TB drive to catch the image onto. I got to the ddrescue command, and ran it. It ran for about an hour before I figured out that it wasnt actually doing anything.. lol It simply kept ticking up the minutes from last successful read, which was not right. The fact that the recovered was not going up, and the error rate was the full 320GB... I knew something was up. Screenshot below, and also one of the destination drive. It has an error...

see here and here

So I tried to reformat the 1TB using the GPUParted thingy, using EXT3 (as directed) and I got an error. So I tried formatting the drive NTFS and that worked!!! So I restarted the PC so I could begin the entire process from the beginning (excluding the formatting part)

So now the 320gb drive is no longer picking up... It WAS picking up when I ran through the whole process... but I made a mistake somewhere along the line I think?

I have run those two commands, and that 320gb drive is not listed. Also in the GNUParted app, also not listed.

please help