Mount Unknown Type External HDD (was NTFS)

Question

I'm new to Ubuntu and came here as my i can't read my external HDD in Windows. So i've booted up my Ubuntu 15.04 install to check if it pops up within the program Disks. The strange part in this picture is it says 1.0TB Unknown as it was an NTFS formatted HDD.

So I've dug a bit deeper and opened up the terminal and executed: sudo fdisk -l

These are the results:

baklap4@baklap4:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 465,8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 2A56DAB5-1CA5-4803-910F-483F4646AB46

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048    616447    614400   300M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda2     616448    821247    204800   100M EFI System
/dev/sda3     821248   1083391    262144   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda4    1083392 736312496 735229105 350,6G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda5  736313344 737282047    968704   473M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda6  737282048 753283071  16001024   7,6G Linux swap
/dev/sda7  753283072 792344575  39061504  18,6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda8  792344576 976771071 184426496    88G Linux filesystem

Disk /dev/sdb: 931,5 GiB, 1000170586112 bytes, 1953458176 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xe3304215

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1               63 1953343349 1953343287 931,4G a2 unknown
/dev/sdb2       1953343350 1953439739      96390  47,1M a2 unknown

As you can see on /dev/sdb both the partitions are type Unknown again.

I've tried to mount sdb1 with the following command sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media returning in the following error:

baklap4@baklap4:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

I have some important data on this disk which i'd like to retrieve but i don't know how. Anyone who can help me?

Answer 1

Unfortunately the disk appears to be severely corrupt, you won't be able to mount it. There are possibly other methods to retrieve the data, a good start would be to use DD to make a clone of it.