Hard Drive External Enclosure issue

[stevedd]

I am using an external exclosure to recover data from a laptop harddrive (Seagate Momentus 5400.3) SATA...

When I plug the harddrive into my PC it recognises it but doesn't allow me to "browse" the drive. It only gives me an option to reformate the 103gb. However it says if I do this I will loose all data on the drive.

Is there any other way to access the data contained on the drive?

 

[vacunita]

Did the laptop have a problem? Is there some reason to believe that the drive may have some damage?

Since the drive is at least being picked up bu the PC, have you tried going to Disk Management and see what it says about the status of the drive?

Assuming this is a Windows machine you are connecting the drive to:
Right Click on My Computer (or Computer) depending on the version of Windows and choose Manage. When the Management Console opens opens go down to Storage, and Choose Disk Management.

The Drive should say something similar to: Healthy(Partition ...)

If it says Healthy you may be able to run a chkdsk on the drive to get it to be browsable again.

Go to Start-Run or the Search Bar(depending on windows Version) and type in "command" and enter.
Then type in:

chkdsk X: /f

where X is the drive letter of the drive in question. Let it run see if it finds any fixable errors.

If the Information is important enough, you can try

http://www.runtime.org

's GetDataBack for NTFS assuming that's the way the drive is formatted to scan the drive and see if it can pick up your files. The Trial version will only give you a Tree View of what it can recover you'll need to buy the full version to be able to recover it.



----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[goombawaho]

If it says "unallocated" in disk management, there is no master boot record and you may or may not want to do a FIXMBR.

I guess I would try some data recovery software first if you are really paranoid about losing the data BEFORE doing the FIXMBR.

GetDataBack for NTFS is not too expensive.

 

[G0AOZ]

... and the (free) trial version of GetDataBack will at least allow you to check if recovery with that software is possible before you buy it.

ROGER - G0AOZ.