laptop hard drive hacked at

fwor

PROLIANT wrote: »

If the HDD is accessible then where is the problem, put it in a caddy and plug it into another machine and off you go?

Or even simpler, boot the PC from a Linux LiveCD, plug in a USB pendrive and transfer any files that you find onto that.

Most Linux distros are "point & click" these days, so you don't really need to know much about them to use them.

bookduck

not all drive work the same in caddies due to cmos translation, some drive have P/W physically in in th firmware of the drive, some people will even save the data back to the original hdd, rather then elsewhere. I bet you know all this stuff too, but others may not and if a choice of SAVE or SAVE AS option comes up, I'm not sure if mspig will really know what to do.

If you mum phoned from the USA saying that she lost the family pics and was distraught, would you say "Oi burn off a linux disk and have a go at mounting a drive and then recover the photos to a separate volume", I know I could not with mine.

fwor

bookduck wrote: »

If you mum phoned from the USA saying that she lost the family pics and was distaught, would you say "Oi burn off a linux disk and have a go at mounting a drive and then recover the photos to a separate volume", I know I could not with mine.

Fair comment. But I was - in relative terms - comparing it to the simplicity of asking my mum to remove a hard drive and place it in a caddy!

In reality, the OP will need to get the help of a technically-minded person to do this, so we're back to the same old problem of the OP finding someone competent that doesn't want to take a stack of cash to help out.

PROLIANT

bookduck wrote: »

not all drive work the same in caddies due to cmos translation, some drive have P/W physically in in th firmware of the drive, some people will even save the data back to the original hdd, rather then elsewhere. I bet you know all this stuff too, but others may not and if a choice of SAVE or SAVE AS option comes up, I'm not sure if mspig will really know what to do.

If you mum phoned from the USA saying that she lost the family pics and was distraught, would you say "Oi burn off a linux disk and have a go at mounting a drive and then recover the photos to a separate volume", I know I could not with mine.

Is there mention of a password on hdd? I cant see one but if I missed it then use the ultimate boot CD which has HDD utils on there to clear pwd.

bookduck

PROLIANT wrote: »

Is there mention of a password on hdd? I cant see one but if I missed it then use the ultimate boot CD which has HDD utils on there to clear pwd.

Nooooo, the little bugg*rs do not ask for a p/w if plugged in outside the lappy environment, they secretly ask the pc/lappy bios for the p/w and if it is not there as in my Thinkpad 600 hdd, the disk was inaccessible, think some others scramble data. Worked fine in the lappy with the correct p/w. This is part of the ata specification

Thanks for the ultimate boot disk tip, will tell my friend who has an xbox, because he said that p/w the disk too.

One the majority of hdd, if you clear the p/w you also make the data unaccessible in a readable form, but you can fdisk and start over - apparently.

PROLIANT

I work as an IT Support Engineer in my day job and I recover laptop drives pretty frequent via the method I posted, I have never known this pwd problem yet, if I do then I will change the HDD controller PCB.

bookduck

Trust you to have a spare one:)

joking aside Dell have this feature too apparently, but it is disabled in the bios. I did not have a spare board for mine, and was a real pig to get it working again.

Someone correctly or incorrectly told me that if I put a new hdd with no p/w in it that it immediately writes the existing bios p/w to the new disk - hate lappy hdds

Glad I no longer do PC support

sco0ter

As it seems a bit unclear as to what the damage to the drive is and whether it is "Physically" damaged or its just had its file system completely destroyed then one easy way to try would be the caddy idea or link it to another PC via IDE cable (which you said the second person had done). I would also recommend THIS software as it is what I used to recover my external hard drive when it knackered.

I kept getting a drive not accessible error and couldnt access the drive at all but the software recovered almost all my photos as well as disk images and documents . out of 160GB of data it recovered 156GB. The software has a free trial so should show you what could be recovered before you buy it and then it is only $80.95 which means around £50.

sco0ter

Data recovery can be a lengthy process. It will matter what software and his own computer spec. It took me 19 hours to recover a 160GB hard drive on my 1.5Mhz laptop using the software I posted above.(that included the transfer to another hard drive).

ollyk

mspig wrote: »

The guy who said that he has the discs has finally rang tonight after i left another not very happy message on his answer machine this morning, he states that the hard drive for my laptop is at his and the one in the laptop at the moment is a spare one he had, and that he has a spare couple of hours tonight to look for the disc and will ring around 10pm to let me know if he has found them(i won't hold my breath).

Funny how hes never mentioned that the hard drive in my laptop is not my own hard drive, but he also said he has the data on his computer but with the software he has it takes two days to do a copy of the info so if he can not find the discs he will start his machine running - does this sound right to anyone?

I hope this 'expert' isn't trying to nick the innards af your laptop and swap for inferior bits of hardware no this does NOT sound ok it stinks!!! Whay would they swap the drives and leave them? Seriously aren't some of these excuses just a bit lame? Disks in the loft and swapped hard drives the very least he could do is start his machine up now and immediately confirm if files are present on your proper hard drive...
Unless your drive is in someone elses machine and he needs the two days to access the workshop or something :rolleyes:
Do you know how big your machines original drive was and can you check the size of this one? - ps it should say this on the drive somewhere.

Seriously try to establish whether the current drive in your laptop is inferior I think that will speak volumes!