Hi here's wishing every one a very happy, creative, sourcefull new year 2011. To start with i have a query about a bad HD (500 Gig) Its a USB connected (and powered ) transcend casing with it think a It has about 8 or 9 partitions - i had originally bought it as a replacement drive for my 80 gig HD so had prepared it with a windows section, two Linux OS sections, a large home, a large data back up etc. I never got around to using this as a replacment for various reasons. The transcend casing has a funny way of working - the usb cable has two inputs - one for power and one for data - and if ever the power section is not inserted (into the computer) then the externl HD tends to crash - and i think my not using this power usb cable resulted in the hd crashing and getting spoilt. Now when i insert it i get the following error message Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb8, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so when i dmesg this is what i get $ dmesg |tail [25026.733113] sdb: sdb1 sdb3 < sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8 sdb9 > [25026.951055] sd 18:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through [25026.951064] sd 18:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk [25032.529044] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds [25032.537121] EXT3-fs warning: maximal mount count reached, running e2fsck is recommended [25032.548251] EXT3 FS on sdb5, internal journal [25032.548258] EXT3-fs: recovery complete. [25032.548263] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. [25033.894657] EXT4-fs (sdb1): barriers enabled [25064.116064] usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 20 ** It seems the HD may not be long term usable so my questions are 1. How do i verify what is wrong with the disk (what diagnostics software) 2. what is the best way to recover the data test disk ?? is there any thing else any other advice thanks ram