R-Studio and GetDataBack are cheaper.

RAISE data recovery is from same manufacturer as UFS and considerably cheaper.

Thank you all for the suggestions but I really need something free... It's not my data, I'm doing this for a friend

Did anything happen leading up to this? Was this issue spontaneous or did you / an application do something to the drive to make it this way?

You should consider cloning the drive first. You can even do this with the UFS Explorer demo. But, if the drive has lots of bad zones, you may need something a little more flexible like ddrescue or hddsuperclone, assuming that the underlying issue isn't a failed head.

I used ddrescue but when I try to mount the iso I get the following error:
Failed to read last sector (487088989): Invalid argument

HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,

or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...),

or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,

or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),

or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).

Failed to mount '/dev/loop0': Invalid argument

The device '/dev/loop0' 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?

Format The Hard Drive/USB/SD Card

Follow the below steps to fix the error “this volume does not contain a recognized file system“

• Connect your inaccessible hard disk, USB or SD memory card to PC.

• On your Windows computer right-click on “This PC/My Computer” and then choose “Manage” and then click on “Disk Management”.

• Now, right-click on RAW drive, USB or SD card and choose “Format”.

• Now rename the “Volume Label”, select file system as NTFS/FAT32, allocate unit size as “Default” and select “Perform a quick format” and finally click on “OK” button.

• Quick Format Hard Drive

• Next, you can simply wait for the process to get completed.

• You may get the following error message “Windows was Unable to Complete the Format” or “The USB drive is write-protected”. In that case, you have to first to fix those issues before formatting.

• In a successful format, you can re-use your hard drive/external HDD, USB or SD card as usual without any error.

Regards,

Rick Bale

I know how to format a drive. I didn't know how to get the data back. I ddrescue-ed it and then used a program called diskgenius. It looked a bit sketchy but since I don't care about my windows install at all I ddrescue-ed the data I gave it a shot and it worked.