Ask The Inferno - Hard drive Data Recovery

Thread starter #1
Hi all

Some time ago a few years ago, I accidentally dropped my external hard drive and now it will no longer connect to my laptop. The hard disk spins when it is connected to the power supply, but it won't connect to the laptop.

Knowing the vast amount of professions and skills on the inferno, does anybody know how to recover and have the facilities to recover the data off a hard drive??

Thanks in advance
Richard
 

TheStub

Active Member
#2
It depends what type of device it is.

If it is a SATA or IDE drive in a fancy box, then you can try taking it out and putting it directly into a machine. That often works - the drop damages the USB interfacing dohicky.

Failing that, you are probably looking at specialists, and forking out money.

Some tips - try to mount the volume read only, to minimise the write operations that the head performs. Next, it may scan but not seek - so you would want to do a byte by byte copy to an image. Then try to read the image.

If you need more detail on any of that, then I'm sure a number of people could help on here. Although, if you live in the Windows world, my first step of 'download Knoppix Linux' may not be the best route ;)
 
Thread starter #3
I tried putting it directly into a desktop pc, but the pc didn't recognise the hdd.

I believe its an SATA drive that was in a special casing.
 
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