recovering data off laptop hard drive

Hi, I'm trying to recover pictures off a dell inspiron 1100. The bios password kicked in and no one including dell knows what it is. So I pulled the (ultra ata) hard drive out of the laptop and put it into a Rocketfish usb enclosure kit. I plugged the enclosure into 2 different computers, one using windows xp and one using vista. The operating system on the laptop hard drive is windows xp. Both computers detected the new drive and installed it, but it won't show up with a drive letter. Any ideas on how to get the drive to show up?

 

That happened to me before, I just reconnected the drive after I waited for a couple of seconds and the drive showed up.

 

Check in the disk management, Start>>rightclick mycomputer>>manage>>Disk Management. it sounds like the sys is loading drivers for the usb enclosure.
if the sys you are using is not showing a drive letter and it not in the disk management it might be died but there is hope. post back after you do that^^^

 

If you check the drive from Windows Management, Disk Management, how is the drive described?

 

The disk is described as "disk1, unknown, 27.95GB, not initialized" and it shows all the memory to be unallocated. Volume has no name, layout is simple, type basic, file system not shown, and status is Healthy(EISA Configuration). Any help would be most welcome. Thank you.

 

This part I'm not sure applies to the laptop drive: Volume has no name, layout is simple, type basic, file system not shown, and status is Healthy(EISA Configuration).

 

Ok, looks like this is the original 30Gb drive that shipped with the laptop but it has no partitions, therefore the MBR (Master Boot Record) has become corrupt.

It should be possible to recover data from the drive (possibly using Freeware utilities, almost certainly using commercial Apps - I would use RecoverMyFiles) and it may be possible to recover the drive completely (MBRWork would be my choice of tool).

MBRWork is free and will not (as far as I am aware) make any later file recovery attempts more complicated. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads-free-software.htm#mbrwork The help files for this are very limited
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showpost.php?p=1328755&postcount=4
http://members.shaw.ca/leesplace/mbrwork.htm
It must be booted from a bootable floppy disk or it can be burned to a CD (MBRWork is also on the Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/)

I don't know if it is possible to use MBRWork over a USB connection, I would buy a 44 pin to 40 pin laptop drive converter like
http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-Hard-Drive-Cable-Adapter/dp/B00006B8C2/ref=pd_cp_ce_0/279-6986968-7428865 (If you use this type of adapter, check your IDE cable type as per http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5160538.html)
or http://www.amazon.co.uk/Euronetwork-drive-laptop-adaptor-cable/dp/B000BB0DDC/ref=pd_cp_ce_1/279-6986968-7428865



I think the best plan for you is first to download and create the Ultimate Boot CD.
Next, connect your laptop drive to a PC using the laptop adapter, disconnecting, if you can, the original hard drive in that PC, noting exactly how it is connected.
Check all connections again then boot from the UBCD.
Navigate through the UBCD menu to start MBRWork then follow the steps below

To check whether your partitions are restored within Windows, power off the PC, reconnect the original drive, (disconnect the laptop drive and connect it in place of the CD/DVD drive(s) or reassemble into the USB case.

Start the PC and Windows (connect the USB drive), navigate to Disk Management, if all went according to plan, you should see your laptop drive looking similar to http://www.bay-wolf.com/harddirve/partition.gif NB, this is the view from within a Dell laptop, your drive will have a higher disk number, be a smaller size and will probably not have a letter assigned to it - that's the next step).

 

I downloaded the trial version on RecoverMyFiles just to see what it would find and after 8 hours I checked the Event Log in the program. It showed Error reading sector 0 and 8 to 2239944 (where I stopped the scan). Is this a really bad sign or is it kind of normal? If I finish running the scan it should take about 6 days so I thought I should ask. Thank you again.

 

I just noticed that the drive manager on this computer does not show the drive, but RecoverMyFiles did find it.

 

RecoverMyFiles is not, for me at least, a very intuitive program, each time I have to use it, it seems like I have to start from square 1 even though I only use it for very specific problems - just like yours, where a partition has become corrupted and 'lost'. The result is that I usually waste many hours by scanning with the wrong settings - I get there in the end though

I've just been to the other PC and started up RMF and I'm still not sure of which settings I normally get best results with for missing partitions ... try the fast format recover first, I think - this should only take an hour or two, the full format recover scan may take 12+ hours (I think that if you get error messges and the RMF is not finding lots of files, you're probably using the wrong options).

My instructions for MBRWork make it look complicated to use, in reality, I've booted from a floppy, used MBRWork, recovered the partitions on the PC's drive and rebooted into a fully recovered Windows in about 6 minutes - it is very fast (it may take much longer with yours, standard Dell partitioning
means there are 3 to 5 partitions to recover - and you wouldn't be able to boot the laptop into windows because of the BIOS lock ).

 

O.K. I did the fast format recovery (with RecoverMyFiles) and it found nothing, then I did the complete file search (with the default settings) and nothing again. I'm not sure what to do next, I would do complete format recovery, but I don't want to do any damage to the data on the drive. Do you have any other advice?

 

The complete format recovery won't affect any data, it is read-only.