Can't access drive taken from laptop

[xrMike]

I have a 10+ year-old HP Pavilion laptop that started to blue screen recently but still worked after a couple of reboots. I just used it for browsing and email. Then it wouldn't boot anymore. I don't remember any of the blue screen codes or wording.

Wanting to pull my personal pics and files off the hard drive before tossing the laptop, I removed the drive, bought a SATA enclosure from Frys, put the drive in it, and plugged it into a good laptop.

I see this:



I click Cancel. Then I run Administrative Tools > Computer Management and see this:



The drive was not making any funny noises or anything. I think the problem with the original laptop was NOT drive-related. Did the drive's file allocation table get hosed the last time I tried to fire up the old laptop?

More importantly, is there any way to get my pics and files off the old drive?

In the 2nd pic, the drive in question is highlighted in red and it looks like it sees the data on it as "RAW". ???

Any suggestions on how to recover my files are much appreciated.

[Wallabing]

RAW means that Windows 7 is unable to recognize it.

Probally because of bad sectors, your hard drive is heavily damaged.

You need to go to a Data recovery specialist.

[ldsnet]

Being 10 years old, what OS and what drive format was installed on the laptop when you removed the drive? Was a disk-at-once encryption program running? That can also cause your discrepancy.

You may need to slave the drive into another host computer (as another drive) to access the data - the USB and SATA enclosure may not be reading the drive correctly (I have had poor luck with a usb enclosure attempting to read an entire NTFS partition that was disk encrypted).

[CGT80]

Encryption was my first question, and the second was if the OS could see it.

Be careful about doing anything that could jeopardize the drive or data.

I was in the same situation as you. A few blue screens on win xp and when I switched out a keyboard and rebooted, I couldn't get it back up.............the computer (get your mind out of the gutter). The hard drive seemed ok.

After a bunch of research I found a company called Data Savers, LLC.

http://www.datasaversllc.com/pricing-and-fees/

They start at $350 for a pro recovery. That is all mine required and they charged about $100 for an external 1TB usb 3.0 drive to put my data on, and some shipping. The owner is active on a hard drive recovery forum and he seemed to be good at doing the tough jobs that other people didn't want. They can do clean room work, but mine was a 320GB drive that was readable just by plugging it into their recovery equipment. Windows, linux, and a usb adapter could not read the data. It was well worth the money to get the files back. They had great customer service and they were very fast.

How much is the data worth to you?

Back up, back up, back up, and then................back up!!!

In the past, I was able to recover like you tried to and then reload windows, but last time, I wasn't so lucky and I had not backed up in a few years. Now I use win 8.1 to backup to the usb drive, I make a manual copy to the usb drive, and I manually make a copy of my data to DVD Mdisc archival grade discs. I don't have a ton of data, so the working copy is on my 256GB SSD. Tonight I learned how to add folders to be backed up by win 8.1. I am going to add my firefox folder, because firefox sync can't be relied on 100% (especially if you decide to not let firefox upgrade on it's own).

Good luck with your recovery!

[bg]

Also remember that Dell and HP used to and may still be branding
their hard drives to HP and Dell specific motherboards..

I've run into this before.

You could try a free software program called Recuva, but
I don't know if you'll get far.

[the86d]

Did MFRs do HDD encryption at the BIOS level back then?

I think some Lenovo notebooks default-encrypt HDDs via the BIOS...