data recovery - Trying to recover an SATA HD

I had a external USB SATA formatted with FAT32, which is dead, with documents, photos, etc. I changed the PCB of the drive and now at least is spinning and making some noise.

Now I'm plugging it into my openSUSE linux (with a SATA quickport XT) but nothing happens.

The USB is mounted in /dev/sdb

I tried the following:

# mount /dev/sdb /mnt 
mount: /dev/sdb: can't read superblock



# fsck /dev/sdb
fsck de util-linux 2.25.1
e2fsck 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

# smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sdb  smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [x86_64-linux-3.16.7-7-desktop] (SUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-14,
Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org Read Device

Identity failed: Invalid argument

Reading this web page I think I ruined the partition with this command... Yes, I'm fool enough to execute commands without understanding at all! :(

# sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdb
mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
¡/dev/sdb es todo el dispositivo, no sólo una partición!
¿Continuar de todas formas? (s,n) s
Se está creando El sistema de ficheros con 244190646 4k bloques y 61054976 nodos-i


UUID del sistema de ficheros: e986eb08-a919-4fe8-98f3-30cc8ff49572
Respaldo del superbloque guardado en los bloques: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
        102400000, 214990848

But anyway, hard drive still is not recognized, fsck is not working.

Now I have fear. I don't want to lose the data, I want to recover it.

What can I do?

Answer

Try to run fdisk -l /dev/sdb to see if the partitions are valid. If so, you could be trying to access the wrong partition (/dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1). If the partition are valid and you are acessing the wrong one, you could try to access the correct one instead.

But if the partitions are not valid, I don't think you will be able to recover anything from this drive in the current state. Using a data recovery program (or company) could recover some data from it, but if the partition is damaged, probably the disk is damaged as well.