[vox] Recovering data

[Mark's tech help]

I have some experience with this kind of thing.  You might want make sure about your assumption re the USB (enclosure I presume).  Even the cable itself could be the problem.  
Once you can get at it, yes PhotoRec is good for recovering files (but wow, all those files without filenames can be a headache.)  TestDisk, part of the same package by Christophe Grenier, is more geared toward salvaging partition tables & such.. seeking for hidden ones etc.  Neither has the most intuitive GUI for the novice.  
That and oodles of other tools ship with recovery-oriented boot CD's such as 

http://distrowatch.com/systemrescue
http://distrowatch.com/trinity
 (oh my.. looks like the latest release was 2010. I'm getting old!)
 
possibly
http://distrowatch.com/clonezilla

and this one is way too Winbloze-centric, but  has some powerful tools to troubleshoot hw:
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

almost forgot this one, not shabby.. has a Linux section of tools:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

--
okay just read your output.  Sees NTFS, but you had formatted it ext4?  Not good.  Had you been running any kind of Windows installer with it attached?  They have no regard for competing filesystems-- quite vicious!
"Test WP failed "  not good.
" Buffer I/O error on device sdb'  NOT good.

Seems your partition table is hosed at the least, but looks worse than that.  I've read about putting drives in the freezer to revive them briefly, possibly, from dead states, but yours is indeed spinning.  So the only thing I'm aware of are super-expensive take-the-thing-apart labs.  (Lesson to everyone..  backup, backup, then backup some more!)
Let us know what you come up with.

Best of luck!
   Mark


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