Getting files from an external SATA enclosure.

Hi everyone, a little background.

My HDD failed in my Vaio so ive bought and installed a new 2.5 SATA drive and the laptop is working fine.

However theres a few files on the old HDD which ideally i would like to recover. I bought a Startech 2.5 SATA enclosure and installed my old HDD into it and connected to my PC. The drives show up on my computer and on drive management. BUT, when i double click to try and browse them im either told that the drive is not formatted or "not accessable", "parameter is incorrect".

I would like to avoid formatting the drive because that would erase my data right?

Any way i can get the data off the drive would be great so any advice appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Have you assigned a drive letter in disk managment?

 

The drive was partitioned so the drive/s show up as G and H.

I havent "assigned a letter", i actually wouldnt know how to do that...

Disc management view is:


Sorry i cant really answer your question.

 

You may need to take ownership of the files.

 

Thanks, i just tried this but its dependant on being able to access folders and unfortunately all i can access are drives.

So when i right click-->properties a drive obviously all i get is drive data and none of the options listed in that guide.

 

Do you see this Security tab ?

 

Afraid not

 

In My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View > Scroll Down -- Uncheck "Use Simple File-Sharing (Recommended)" and Apply.

Now see if the Security tab is available.

 

Yep i see it now, ill reboot and see if i can take ownership.

Thanks.

 

I rebooted in safe mode and the option went away again.

Ive now restarted in normal mode and even though the option is still unchecked i cant see the security tab again. Here is what i can see. I really dont know why the option would have disappeared as randomly....

 

Try checking and unchecking that option again, and do the ownership thing in normal windows. Did you have any sort of password on that drive ?

 

Ive checked/unchecked a few times.

It looks like im getting the option on my C/D drives from my internal hdd but not from the G/H on the external???

Confusing. No password.

 

Try running GParted with the external attached, and see if the partitions are detected. The HDD seems to be RAW. Most likely the partition table has been screwed up or something.

You can also try running TestDisk and Recuva to scan and recover files from the G/H partitions.

 

Any help?

 

In your first post you mentioned that the drive had failed, so you may not be able to recover anything.

One thing to try is to boot a Linux live CD (like Ubuntu) and see of it can read anything from the drive. I have had situations where Linux could read from corrupted devices (like a CF card) that Windows reported as unformatted. Like someone else mentioned, there may be Windows programs that can recover data from a corrupted disk. Did you try any of those?

Depending on how extensive the damage is, you may or may not be able to easily recover the files you want.

HTH,
hank