Retrieving Data from a crashed laptop HD.

Hello all.

A friends laptop stopped booting, for reasons unknown. He had some important information on the HD and I'm hoping I can get at it.

I bought an enclosure that fits the HD, I'm able to connect it to another computer via USB cable. I figured it would be as simple as that, however it appears to not be the case.

When it comes to connecting the enclosure to my working computer, It's not showing up on my computer, also the red led on the enclosure, which apparently means accessing HD stays red and never goes to the Green light which means ready.

Could this signal that the HD itself is broken? and if so is there something that can be done to access it outside of this? or could it be that the enclosure itself is faulty?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer some insight.

 

Do you hear the motor in the hard drive spinning up? Any loud clicks? If no sounds at all, it's probably shot. A working drive should give a faint whirring sound as the motor spins the platters inside.. Loud clicking isn't good either. Try leaving the cover off the enclosure (if possible) and give a listen.

Sam

 

Hey Sam, thanks for answering.
It all sounds ok, the whirring you mention is happening, no stops or loud clicks at all, sounds like its running fine. But the red light stays on and the computer doesn't acknowledge it as being there other than the noise made when putting the usb in.

 

Oh no I hope not, Its pretty important information that they don't want to lose. What would other options be? Could I try putting it in a zip lock bag and freezing it and retrying? or should I just give up

 

When you plug the enclosure into you PC do you hear the ding sound like you do when you plug in anything else to it?

what OS are you running?

My HD died on me and i put it in a desktop then ran a program to retrieve pics and such from it

 

Greetings, doddz.

You may be able to access the data from a live Linux distro: Mint, Puppy and Ubuntu are all nice and easy. Download the .iso file, and burn that file as an image to a CD/DVD (ImgBurn is a good .iso burning software if you don't already have one). If you need a walkthrough on how to burn an image, a quick tutorial is located here. Then boot to that disk, and run the OS as a live environment (in other words, don't install it - just run it from the optical drive). If Linux can see the drive, you may be able to transfer the data to a flash drive.

If that doesn't work, you might also be able to boot to something like TestDisk, see if that can help.

And, as a last resort, there are forensic labs available (such as DriveSavers and Ontrack) that can certainly retrieve the data, but you'll have to fork out some $$$.

 

Check real quick if the drive shows in Disk Management.

Click Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc in the Open: line and click OK. The Disk Management snap-in will open. Do you see the HD listed in the graph?

 

My enclosures came with instructions to set the drives I enclosed to master. It is worth taking a look to be sure that the drive's jumpers are set to master and not cable select. There should be a diagram on the drive showing you the proper jumper setting.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone, I've tried near enough everything and have decided just to give up and get him a new HD all together, Thank you though!

 

Hope it goes alright - if you need any help, let us know.

Good luck, and thanks for the feedback. :major

 

This happened to me once. I switched from a single end USB cord to one that had two standard USB ends that plugged into the computer. For whatever reason (better power?) it worked and I was able to access the drive.

 

holiday, I never thought of that. My enclosures came with a power supply so do not depend on a USB to supply the power. Maybe the hd does need more power than one USB port can supply.