I would like to reformat my hard disk, and if possible recover the (somewhat unimportant) contents if possible. I have a Western Digital 1TB hard drive which had a NTFS partition. I unplugged the drive without safely removing it first. At first a pop up was asking me to use a Windows OS to run the chkdsk /f command, however, in the effort to keep using a Linux OS I used the ntfsfix command on the ubuntu terminal Now, when I try to access the hard drive, it doesn't show up anymore in Nautilus. I tried reformatting it using Disk Utility, but it gives me an error message, and Gparted would hang on the "Scanning devices" step infinitely. Please comment any output that you would like to see and I will add it to my question. EDIT disk utility tells me is on /dev/sdb the command sudo fdisk -l gives dodohjk@DodosPC:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for dodohjk: Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 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 Disk identifier: 0x0006fa8c Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 4094 482344959 241170433 5 Extended /dev/sda2 482344960 488396799 3025920 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda5 4096 31461127 15728516 83 Linux /dev/sda6 31463424 52434943 10485760 83 Linux /dev/sda7 52436992 62923320 5243164+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 62924800 482344959 209710080 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000202043392 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121600 cylinders, total 1953519616 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 Disk identifier: 0x6e697373 This doesn't look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 ? 1936269394 3772285809 918008208 4f QNX4.x 3rd part /dev/sdb2 ? 1917848077 2462285169 272218546+ 73 Unknown /dev/sdb3 ? 1818575915 2362751050 272087568 2b Unknown /dev/sdb4 ? 2844524554 2844579527 27487 61 SpeedStor Partition table entries are not in disk order I wrote something wrong here, however here the output of fsck /dev/sbd is dodohjk@DodosPC:~$ sudo fsck /dev/sdb fsck from util-linux 2.20.1 e2fsck 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012) ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks... fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdb The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device&gt;