Trying to recover data from my old hard drive

sophlowe45

I'm trying to recover data from my old hard drive, so I bought an external hard drive enclosure for it.

i can't see any data when i click on local disk (E) which is what it comes up as, but when defragging the drive, it says correctly capacity 37.25GB, free space 13.67GB, 36% free space. i am currently defragging the drive and thats working perfectly fine.

So to some extent its recognised there is data on the drive, is there anything i can do to access it?

if i took it to a data recovery place they would charge to recover data, but what kind of things would they do to recover it? Is there anything i can try myself?

Thanks very much if anyone can help.

sophlowe45

another query - after attempting to recover data from this hard drive, i'll throw it away and want to take my current hard drive in my desktop out and put in the external hard drive enclosure and use it an external HD BUT its been partitioned on my desktop as C drive and D drive, if i put this HD into the external case and link it to my laptop will i lose the data on one of the partitions and if so can i figure out which one beforehand?

Its 80GB in total and been partitioned as Local Disk D 47GB and Local Disk C as 29.2GB.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

albertross_2

Is this Windows XP?

If it is 98, you may need this:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsWindows98.html

Why have you swapped drives, did you have a problem with the original hard disk, or just wanted more space?

leesmithg

You could always try here

sophlowe45

I had to replace the hard drive in my desktop as it stopped booting up and my uni I.T Services said i needed to replace it although they could recover stuff for me at £15 a CD.

I'm trying to recover stuff myself but have had no luck so far, tried a few different data recovery programs

Then as my desktop was ready to bin, it needed a new motherboard within a couple of months, I.T Services upgraded it to XP, i didn't have enough RAM etc to run XP, i bought a new computer a laptop and i want to make the new hard drive in my desktop my external hard drive for my laptop and then just sell/throw away the desktop computer parts.

Hope that all makes sense! I've been told to use partition magic on my HD in my desktp to merge the partitions before taking it out and putting it into the external case, but it has the OS and Office etc. installed on it, can i delete that once i've hooked it up to my laptop?

Sorry for the daft questions!!

leesmithg

sophlowe45 wrote:

I had to replace the hard drive in my desktop as it stopped booting up and my uni I.T Services said i needed to replace it although they could recover stuff for me at £15 a CD.

I'm trying to recover stuff myself but have had no luck so far, tried a few different data recovery programs

Then as my desktop was ready to bin, it needed a new motherboard within a couple of months, I.T Services upgraded it to XP, i didn't have enough RAM etc to run XP, i bought a new computer a laptop and i want to make the new hard drive in my desktop my external hard drive for my laptop and then just sell/throw away the desktop computer parts.

Hope that all makes sense! I've been told to use partition magic on my HD in my desktp to merge the partitions before taking it out and putting it into the external case, but it has the OS and Office etc. installed on it, can i delete that once i've hooked it up to my laptop?

Sorry for the daft questions!!

Sometimes your PC won't boot for various reasons, could be a knackered graphics card, loose ide cable, boot sector virus, fan knackered or overclocked system causing too much heat.

There is a way of recovering data from a cream crackered hard drive however, set it a slave to a master HD, wrap HD in a sealed plastic wrap bag and freeze it over night.

It does work on some times.