Nah, the pension protest had much larger popular support, as it affected basically everyone. Most of the demonstrations here are just walks to protest about police brutality and the pointless death of a kid. And then you have the actual riots that make a lot of noise but don’t have actual support.
It sounds like your partition table is corrupted. Recreating it (with parted or fdisk) shouldn’t affect the data. Also, I believe that if it shows up as a block device, you should be able to copy it with dd. dd can write to another block device or to a file (like an iso).