Old external hard drive

You do this first - it creates the directory where you will access the files
sudo mkdir /media/source

Then this one - it makes the disk accessible to you in the /media/source folder
sudo mount /dev/sde1 /media/source

I am getting bash: sudo: command not found
I get this when I enter either of the previous commands that you mentioned.

Do this:
su - that’s su

It should prompt you for the root password. (Hope you know it).

Then you should be able to do the commands without the sudo in front.

How do I find out what the root password is?
This is what I have now.

If you don’t know the root password, I can’t help with that.
However, it doesn’t look like it prompted you for the password and notice it is root@localhost instead of guest@localhost.
Should be good , now try the two commands without sudo.
mkdir /media/source
mount /dev/sde1 /media/source

This is the results.

I guess you were able to the /media/source file before.
You can do and ls -pal /media command to see if destination folder is there too.

Well the bad news is either the disk is corrupted or it is not a Linux file system on it.

I guess that’s as far as I can go with it.
Thank you for all the help.

Is the disk bad ?
We can try a repair (no guarantees)

The file system is probably corrupted due to the power surge that came through the network connection and out through the USB to the drive.

You can try this. This command depends on the disk being /dev/sde
It will take a while as it will check for bad blocks.
If you don’t want to test for bad blocks, remove the c parameter. i.e. change -cpvf to -pvf in the command below.
fsck -cpvf /dev/sde

You don’t put the 1 on the end, that is pointing to a partition on the disk, not the disk itself.
Also, isn’t the source disk sde not sdc ???
You have to be careful issuing commands.

fsck -cpvf /dev/sde <— No 1 on end

I had the same results without the 1.
The disk ID sdc, is identified when I use the lsblk. This is my one terabyte source disc.

One thing to try is this:
dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 | grep superblock

That will list alternate superblocks.

Post the output

Guess it is toast.
Only thing to do is reformat and hope it isn’t physically damaged.

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