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Hi all
I was wondering if someone could help me here. My Toshiba laptop gave up the other day with mobo problems, but hard disk is fine with alot of important data I need to get off.
I read a few threads re data recovery, and choose to get a USB enclosure in order to recover my important data off the drive.
My other laptop runs vista and cannot see the drive although installed the drivers correctly. I have gone through Disk Management which can see the drive and reports it as raw, but I am unable to shrink/partition the drive in order to access the data on the drive.
I have googled endlessly and after a few giddy hours am no further/wiser as to how I can access this drive in order to retrieve my data.
I have thought about attaching it to an XP machine as the drive was running XP home but no-one I know no longer runs XP but all run vista.
Can anyone suggest any ideas?
DO NOT write anything to the drive. partitioning it will cause more damage to your data.
You could try using Knoppix to copy files from the drive. If that doesn't work then you may need to use on of the file recovery software programs available.
I believe there are some listed on the right of this screen, under Data Recovery.
Get Knoppix at the link below.
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I have found older laptop drives do not
function in external USB enclosures. Your
best bet maybe an IDE cable adapter in a
desktop machine with IDE controller.
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I have installed GetBackData, with no luck. It is reporting every sector as bad, problem I have is I cannot install it as a secondary drive as my current hard drive is sata, and the drive im trying to recover is ide?
I know for a fact the drive has no bad sectors and is healthy, the solftware help also tells me if it finds nothing to attach it as a secondary drive, but I cannot. The laptop it has come out of is only 3 years old.
Even if I could, my current laptop is still under warranty and i would not want to void it.
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"I know for a fact the drive has no bad sectors and is healthy".
How do you know that? You stated the drive "gave up the other day with mobo problems". So you don't really know what the current condition of that drive is.
You could try running a drive fitness test on it, assumming the external shows when booting to the fitness test disk. You will need to know the brand of the drive and then download the utility. You may even find one that will run from inside Vista.
What brand and model is the IDE drive in question?
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Thanks for your responses.
It was the motherboard that failed, hard drive was healthy a week ago as I did a scan and defrag. I can see the drive in Disk Management and it reports healthy.
I will post back brand and model of drive later as it is currently in an enclosure and I have started GetDataBack scanning again with more options checked.
I will then do a drive fitness test just to confirm drive healthy.
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Hi again
My drive is a toshiba MK6026GAX.
GetDataBack cant see the drive anymore under physical drives, only under logical drives, very confusing.
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Have now tried quite a few recovery software, non of them find anything, can anyone give me any further ideas?
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Was the hard drive in question partitioned into multiple partitions?
The utilities you are using have all been able to identify the drive? Just not see or recover anything?
How does WinXP see the drive?
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The drive only had 1 primary partition. Yes all utilities can see the drive but not recover anything.
Do not know how winXP sees the drive, but Vista sees it in 'my computer' and in disk management as RAW, if you try and access it from 'my computer' it cannot read it.
I have also tried Knoppix and again it sees it but cannot access it, it cant mount it.
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I sounds like there is no data on the drive. You could try using testdisk.
Be sure to read instruction for use before attempting anything.
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Hi and thanks for your response.
I am currently using testdisk following instructions step by step. I have just choose 'Create' to create a new log file and it is now saying 'please wait'. Does it take a very long time? only it has been saying please wait for an hour now, not sure if there is a problem?
There must be data on the disk, as I said the disk was fine, it contains winXP and all my files? does the fact that the motherboard has failed affect the hard drive?
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ok I give up. I have decided to format the drive back to zeros and use it as a backup external hard drive.
Can I just confirm with yourselves the way I am going to do it will work?
Firstly I will boot the laptop via a CD, using Window Washer boot CD. Using windows washer I will format the external disk back to zeros and Fdisk it and then format it, all via USB?
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I would run a drive fitness test on it first.
Toshiba doesn't have a utility itself. Hitachi drive utility is said to work on all brands. Seagate (maxtor) utility may work. Below is a link to most drive fitness utilities.
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic760...
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I have run a drive fitness test on drive, drive is healthy. Drive now set back to zeros, but there is no fdisk in Vista? How can I set a new primary partition on the disk? looking at disk management it is unallocated and my only choice is 'new simple volume'?
Any ideas.
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Can't help you with the terminology in Vista because I don't use it. I would imagine there must be some help files accompanying Vista that would explain that choice. May have something to do with being an external drive.
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