Can I boot Gparted live USB on a USB-C port?

Question

I have an HP Laptop 15-ef1082nr (4S917UA) with the following port specs:

Ports: 1 USB Type-C® 5Gbps signaling rate (supports data transfer only and does not support charging or external monitors); 2 USB Type-A 5Gbps signaling rate; 1 AC smart pin; 1 HDMI 1.4b; 1 headphone/microphone combo.

Here is the spec sheet

It came with windows on an internal 256GB NVME m.2 SSD But before I even powered the machine or booted the first time I replaced the internal SSD to a 1TB and upgraded the RAM to 16GB installed 20.04 LTS clean.

24.04 LTS Upgraded from 20.04, 22.04...

I'm trying to recover a 2TB external backup data disk onto another 2TB external disk using a live Gparted session but I only have three USB ports as per spec sheet. I used this same external backup disk to backup all my data before the 24.04 upgrade without issue.

I have not had to recover a backup disk before. The plan is to use the USB-C port to boot the live session and the USB-A ports for the transfer. Using Testdisk to recover the data, fix the file system or the partition table, or whatever.

BTW Testdisk in normal 24.04 session terminal shows all files and directories available without a D or unrecoverable condition. No red file names etc. It's all there I just can't mount it.

I have been hyperfocused on this task so, better options or suggestions are welcome.

I don't understand what happened to the 1st backup disk but it would not mount and gave me a long winded fail message. I'll edit this with the exact fail message later but it seemed like it was something simple like a file system problem or a partition table problem.

Perhaps I previously pulled it out of the port while it was still ON though unmounted. Which is a new feature I guess. Used to eject and were done.

Testdisk in analyze mode shows the file system as HPFS NTFS which puzzles me. I am rather certain this disk was Fat32 when purchased. Under normal session I used Tesdisk to copy sda1 to sdb1(the new disk) and it too now, will not mount. I think I cloned the problem. So I figure I need to do this in live cd mode. I don't really know I'm just trying to find answers. Regular USB-A thumb or flash drives 8G, 16G, 128G fat32 mount without issue.

Thank you for time and effort.

Answer 1

I found this top answer that FIXED my backup drive and saved me a bunch of time and trouble. I let this question sit for a while as I did not want to do anything hasty or otherwise ruin my backup drive.

The first part of my question was whether I could run Gparted liveCD from my USB-C port.

The answer is yes. I bought a USB-C drive and loaded the iso image via Startup Disk Creator. I also had to place the LiveCD USB as the first boot order on this UEFI boot system, with secure boot disabled already in the disabled state.

I then ran testdisk to verify the current name of the unmountable backup drive and determined everything was there as I stated in my question above.

I then found the question and answer linked above and wondered if I could use the ntfs-3g app. I had never heard or read about this before. Specifically:

sudo ntfsfix -b -d /dev/sdb1

Here is the output:

x@x-HP:~$ sudo ntfsfix -b -d /dev/sdb1 Mounting volume... OK Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully. Checking the alternate boot sector... OK NTFS volume version is 3.1. Going to un-mark the bad clusters ($BadClus)... No bad clusters...OK NTFS partition /dev/sdb1 was processed successfully. x@x-HP:~$

The moment the command completed my backup drive /dev/sdb1 mounted automatically. I went into Files and checked via GUI all my backup files were accounted for. I will now backup my backup onto an EXT3 drive.

My backup trouble began inexplicably and the solution was found in a similarly random fashion.

Even a blind dog finds a bone every now and then :)