Recovering files from a laptop hard drive

[Candace66]

Recently, my old laptop gave up the ghost. It crapped out rather suddenly and despite utilizing the recovery disc, I was never able to get it to actually boot up again (it's a Winders machine).

There are some recent photos on there that I hadn't backed up yet, that I'd love to get back. So I bought a hard drive enclosure. This allows you to turn the laptop hard drive into an external hard drive. With any luck, you can then just plug it into another computer and access the files on the disc.

Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky. After hooking it up to my little netbook (I was reluctant to plug the mess into my new laptop), I still couldn't read the disc. The LED on the enclosure lights, you can hear the little hard drive whirring, and it popped up as an E:\ drive. But when I click on it, Winders says the location is inaccessible.

Anybody got any other ideas?

[Sombeech]

What exactly were you able to do with the Recovery Disk? Hopefully you weren't able to begin a recovery to the factory condition or else that would wipe everything out.

I happen to work on this stuff all the time, I've sent you a Private Message

[DiscGo]

Stick the harddrive in the freezer for about 6 hours. Freezing it will often provide 10-20 minutes of life out of harddrive.

[Candace66]

Stick the harddrive in the freezer for about 6 hours. Freezing it will often provide 10-20 minutes of life out of harddrive.

That's one suggestion I haven't heard from anybody else!

I've tried a hard drive enclosure, but when I plugged it into my other laptop Windows still couldn't access the disc. Somebody is helping me out with a CD to hopefully get the old laptop to boot.

[Candace66]

Finally got a chance to mess with this again. I was given a boot disc (to let the computer boot up to an XP desktop directly from the disc) to try. I did get to the desktop, but didn't have much luck with the utilities that were recommended to me.

For example, in Disk Investigator, the disk information for C: included a lot of zeroes. "Size" was 0 Mb; File system was "UNKNOWN"; Number of copies of FAT was zero; sectors per FAT was zero; etc.

With the Test Disk utility, I got the DOS-like window and used the "Analyze" option. After running it for awhile, it said "Analyse Cylinder xx/xxxxx" then said, for example, "Read error @ 14/0/1 (1 ba = 224910). I eventually quit out of that utility.

As for Explorer XP, it took a good 10 minutes to get the window fully up. C: was listed along with RAMdisk (B:) and BartPE (D:). But when I tried to expand C:, I didn't see anything and it disappeared from the lefthand list!

I'm beginning to think my files are toast. Unless SomBeech still thinks he can help!

[Deathcricket]

Stick the harddrive in the freezer for about 6 hours. Freezing it will often provide 10-20 minutes of life out of harddrive.

This is exactly what I was going to say, put it in a couple ziplock baggies though to prevent moisture damage. Should be just enough time to get the files off the drive.

[Sombeech]

I'd still be happy to look at this for you, I'm 5 minutes from Layton. No charge if I can't get anything recovered for you

[rockgremlin]

Bummer....I hate it when my porn folders get zapped.

[Candace66]

Bummer....I hate it when my porn folders get zapped.

Speak for yourself.

[Sombeech]

Let me know if you have any more problems with it.