unallocated HD

[Guest]

My daughter brought her laptop home for me to salvage her data off her HD. I
can connect it via USB adapters to my laptop and it picks up and recognizes
the HD. It does not show up in my computer, but in disk management it shows
as unallocated space.

It wants me to initialize it, I think I am forced to do this, but do not
want to chance ruing anymore data, and partition recovery is a demo and not
of any use to me, although it sees files on the disk.

Any suggestions to help recover the data? She is in the army and has a
family and all her docs and pictures form Korea are on teh disk and I want to
help, any ideas please?

 

[Anna]

My daughter brought her laptop home for me to salvage her data off her HD.
I
can connect it via USB adapters to my laptop and it picks up and
recognizes
the HD. It does not show up in my computer, but in disk management it
shows
as unallocated space.

It wants me to initialize it, I think I am forced to do this, but do not
want to chance ruing anymore data, and partition recovery is a demo and
not
of any use to me, although it sees files on the disk.

Any suggestions to help recover the data? She is in the army and has a
family and all her docs and pictures form Korea are on teh disk and I want
to
help, any ideas please?

Kim:
First of all, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you "Initialize" the drive.
That's a prelude for, in effect, destroying whatever data is on that drive.

The fact that Disk Management sees the drive as containing "unallocated
space" is an ominous signal, although it is possible that the drive has been
multi-partitioned and there is "unallocated (disk) space" on the drive in
addition to another partition or partitions containing the data you wish to
recover.

But frankly, this does not sound like a good situation in terms of accessing
data off that drive. It sounds like the data is very important for your
daughter & family. As such, under these circumstances, I would strongly
recommend you take the laptop to a local computer repair facility, hopefully
one that you know or can find out, that has a good reputation for their
diagnoses and recommendations.
Anna

 

[Ron Martell]

My daughter brought her laptop home for me to salvage her data off her HD. I
can connect it via USB adapters to my laptop and it picks up and recognizes
the HD. It does not show up in my computer, but in disk management it shows
as unallocated space.

It wants me to initialize it, I think I am forced to do this, but do not
want to chance ruing anymore data, and partition recovery is a demo and not
of any use to me, although it sees files on the disk.

Any suggestions to help recover the data? She is in the army and has a
family and all her docs and pictures form Korea are on teh disk and I want to
help, any ideas please?

I distrust USB adapters for this type of recovery.

If the data is important invest a few dollars into a 2.5 to 3.5 inch
IDE adapter and see if that gives you any better results.

What may be happening is that the drive is being recognized via the
USB adapter with different parameters (cylinders, heads, sectors per
track) than it was configured with in the laptop, and therefore the
drive content is not readable.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

 

[Guest]

Thank you for both responses - however she does not have the money to take it
someplace to have this done, is there anyone that can help me with
suggestions as to software that is reliabe and I can do this myself or have
the techs at my school help?

 

[Anna]

I distrust USB adapters for this type of recovery.

If the data is important invest a few dollars into a 2.5 to 3.5 inch
IDE adapter and see if that gives you any better results.

What may be happening is that the drive is being recognized via the
USB adapter with different parameters (cylinders, heads, sectors per
track) than it was configured with in the laptop, and therefore the
drive content is not readable.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

Thank you for both responses - however she does not have the money to take
it
someplace to have this done, is there anyone that can help me with
suggestions as to software that is reliabe and I can do this myself or
have
the techs at my school help?

Kim:
Since you indicate that there are "techs" at your school that might help
you, do this...

1. First & foremost, and this is important. BEFORE they begin "working" on
the problem drive, ask the techs to "clone" the drive to another hard drive.
Presumably they will have a disk imaging program available to them which
they can use to copy ("clone") the contents of the problem drive to another
drive. This will be a temporary measure just to safeguard the contents on
the problem drive while they work on a cloned copy of that drive. The techs
will surely have programs available to them which will allow them to "look
into" the drive and possibly access its data if the data is there and
accessible.

2. Hopefully, they will have one or more so-called "data recovery" programs
available to them or they can get their hands on one. If you or she wants to
try using one of these programs you can do a Google search on "data recovery
programs". There are scores of programs out there that purport to recover
lost data from hard drives. Personally I can't recommend any particular one
since my experience with them has been rather limited and not at all
satisfactory in cases like this. (There are superior professional data
recovery programs available, but they can cost thousands of dollars).
Perhaps someone coming upon this thread will suggest a data recovery program
that might prove useful to you.

Frankly, from the description you gave of the problem I'm not at all
sanguine that you'll be able to recover the data, but there's certainly no
harm in trying.
Anna

 

[Guest]

Hello,

EASEUS DataRecoveryWizard utility can help. Speaking about me, it was
easily able to restore deleted, lost file and unformat drive,
so I think you will also find it quite useful. Really recommended
tool, give it a try.

http://www.easeus.com/