Internal HD in External Enclosure: Not showing in Windows Explorer

Ronan H

I'm helping out a friend:

He has an old Windows XP machine with a lot of very important documents on it (and of course, no backup copy! :mad: ). It will not boot up and is giving the error message about not being able to load the PBR (Primary Boot Record). After trying to remedy this via recovery console etc., and failing (because all solutions will cause loss of the data), I suggested we get a 3.5 SATA hard drive enclosure, put the HD in it and just copy what is needed off the HD to a safe place. Se we did...well, we got the enclosure, the copying part is not quite as straight forward!

Now I have a further issue. The drive is fitted in the enclosure and connected to my Windows 7 laptop, but it wont show up in Windows Explorer (presumably because it has no drive letter: see the next bit about Disk Management). It is showing up in Device Manager. In Disk Management, it prompts me to initialise the disk, which will give it a drive letter etc., but AFAIK, that will rewrite the MBR and some partition stuff and effectively delete what is on the drive, again defeating the purpose of what I am trying to do.

Does anyone know of how I can get access to this disk to get the stuff off it? After the stuff is safe, it can initialise itself to orgasm for all I care. I just want to get the bloody stuff off it!

If it's of any relevance, the enclosure is a full enclosure that will allow the HD to be used as an external hard drive. There was also a slot-in dock style solution that I could have bought. Would this have made any difference?

Really appreciate some help on this, I know there are some tech heads in here!

Cheers!

Ro

Capt'n Midnight

DO NOT SAY YES IF WINDOWS ASKS YOU TO FORMAT THE DRIVE

Capt'n Midnight

www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec will recover files from the drive, but it will be a mess as you won't get filenames - that's plan Z if all else fails



I've never been happy with newer versions of windows writing to older disks just it does something stupid.

if you want to grab files without writing to the disk try a linux live CD

Ronan H

Thanks Captain.

Yeah I certainly wont be formatting it at any stage until after I get the files off it. Any of the Windows solutions seem to be a bit nuclear and I'm wary of them to be honest.

I have tried accessing the drive with a Knoppix boot but it wasn't able to read the drive, although it did come up in the file explorer. I might try a couple of other Linux boots to see if they make any difference.

I should probably also try and connect the enclosure to a Windows XP machine to see if there is some OS incompatibility or something going on in Windows 7.

A lot of Googling suggests that this is quite a common (and seldom remedied) problem, albeit a lot of the threads a years old so maybe it was more common on older Dell machines.

Ro

Capt'n Midnight

hopefully it's just ye olde drive geometry shennagins

if you are comfortable with linux you could use testdisk to realign the partition table - read it's help on taking a backup of the table ( there is a windows version IIRC )


http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start contains most of the utils you will need. one handy thing is that SMART reports and utils are easily availabe - ie. test the drive is working

note not all smart features work through a USB cradle

If you use virtual box you can just boot up the iso image in a window and give it control of the USB port the cradle is on

and yes you might see more if you put it in a desktop computer


Yes there are windows data recovery tools, but apart from running fsck (yes it can be turned off) Linux generally doesn't try to modify the disk as the first step.

I've had to recover drives that people formatted because windows didn't like them :mad:

Ronan H

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If you use virtual box you can just boot up the iso image in a window and give it control of the USB port the cradle is on

Thanks I'l look into some of that stuff.

Can you give me a bit more on the above part though? Boot up what iso?

Capt'n Midnight

Ronan H wrote: »

Thanks I'l look into some of that stuff.

Can you give me a bit more on the above part though? Boot up what iso?

any iso , just saves burning a Linux CD for a single use,

Ronan H

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

any iso , just saves burning a Linux CD for a single use,

Aah yeah, duh to me!