Hi all,
A colleague had his laptop fail on him (serious power/battery), and I'm
trying to suck the data of the disk.

The disk is a Toshiba MK4025GAS.

We've put it in an external USB 2.5" disk chassis, and it is visible to
XP.

However, in Disk Management, the disk is coming up as just a partition
called BOOT. It is also 'healthy (active)', and is showing 37.25GB
NTFS.

Is there anything more I can do in XP to actually see what's on the
disk? There are not options in Disk Management to do much - for this
disk, the only one which is enabled is 'delete partition' (which I
don't feel inclined to do!).

Any thoughts??


James

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:

> Hi all,
> A colleague had his laptop fail on him (serious power/battery), and
> I'm trying to suck the data of the disk.
>
> The disk is a Toshiba MK4025GAS.
>
> We've put it in an external USB 2.5" disk chassis, and it is visible
> to XP.
>
> However, in Disk Management, the disk is coming up as just a partition
> called BOOT. It is also 'healthy (active)', and is showing 37.25GB
> NTFS.
>
> Is there anything more I can do in XP to actually see what's on the
> disk? There are not options in Disk Management to do much - for this
> disk, the only one which is enabled is 'delete partition' (which I
> don't feel inclined to do!).

Rather than looking at the drive with XP, I'd use Knoppix to see if you
can read the data. If Knoppix can't read it, then you can try some data
recovery software. I use Ontrack's Easy Recovery Pro, but it is
expensive. Here's information on retrieving data with Knoppix:

An easy way to retrieve Windows files is to boot with Knoppix, a Linux
distro on a live cd. You will need a computer with two cd drives, one
of which is a cd/dvd-rw OR a usb thumb drive with enough capacity to
hold your data. To get Knoppix, you need a computer with a fast
Internet connection and third-party burning software. Download the
Knoppix .iso from www.knoppix.net and create your bootable cd. Then
boot with it and it will be able to see the Windows files. If you are
using the usb thumb drive, right-click on its icon (on the Desktop) to
get its properties and uncheck the box that says "Read Only". Then
click on it to open it. Note that the default mouse action in the
window manager used by Knoppix (KDE) is a single click to open instead
of the traditional MS Windows' double-click. Otherwise, use the K3b
burning program to burn the files to cd/dvd-r's.

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User

Just tried Knoppix recently and it really does work great booting from
CD. If that doesn't work, you might want to get a cheap disk caddy,
hook the drive up to a desktop and then use common freeware data
recovery tools to mine out the lost files. Here's a collection of such
freeware tools:

http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm

Thanks for the info.

I've booted up into Puppy Linux (which I believe is a Knoppix flavour),
and attached in a USB caddy.

Puppy hardware probe shows it as:
/dev/sdb|Direct-Access|TOSHIBA MK420GAS

But it is not available as a mountable device.

Any suggestions?
Can I mount it manually?

Meanwhile, I'll look at the recovery tools link you sent!

Thanks,

James
c...@aahh.com wrote:
> Just tried Knoppix recently and it really does work great booting from
> CD. If that doesn't work, you might want to get a cheap disk caddy,
> hook the drive up to a desktop and then use common freeware data
> recovery tools to mine out the lost files. Here's a collection of such
> freeware tools:
>
> http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm