Comments on: How to recover data from failed laptop or notebook

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:00:37 +0000

Need help! I have a Seagate Momentus SATA 7200 RPM 320GB laptop hard disk drive that failed on me about a year ago. I have been trying awhile now to recover some videos of my kid’s sporting events over the years which reside on this failed hard drive. I am using a SATA / IDE to USB 2.0 Adapater, but have been unable to see the contents of the failed drive on my good laptop when I connect the failed drive to it through the appropriate USB port. I can hear the disk drive running when I turn on the SATA / IDE adapter, however, my laptop it is connected to doesn’t see it. Any suggesstions? I am a little computer savvy, but this issue is really got me dumbfounded. Any help is appreciated. Thanks

By: Raj K

Raj K — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:24:38 +0000

Thanks, I have Toshiba Satellite A305-S6843, using last 4 years and had no issues till recently. Laptop started shutting down in middle. Your website http://www.irisvista.com/tech/ helped me disassemble and clean the heat sink and fan assembly. The pictures and directions helped me lot and the laptop running without any heat related problems and I recommend using these instruction and pictures. Though, there are one or two pictures or different to my model on heat sink, overall very help full. Thanks for your website.

By: Jeff S

Jeff S — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:51:28 +0000

Not sure if this is still open, but with my Toshiba Tecra A8, it crashed, I reinstalled XP and can now get into safe mode. It tells me the Windows is not registered, and when I click on yes to register it stalls the puter. If I click no, it logs me off. In safe mode I have retrieved everything except “My Safe” contents. It is a secure area evidently not accessable in safe mode. For safety/security! I am at a loss. It accepts my fingerprint to get into the system, but won’t let me register it now or later, so I cannot get into it in regular mode. It is maddening! Any suggestions would be great. If I pull the HD and connect to another computer, will it do any good? Will I be able to get any further? I have some pretty critical data in my safe, hence it’s in the safe. But it won’t let me in. You can email if you like, I will follow whatever suggestions you have. Thanx so much for your time and talents.
Jeff

By: T800

T800 — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:05:31 +0000

This really helped! (thumbsup)
A small advice:
If you are buying case for laptop HDD, see what kind of connector cable it uses, because HDD needs enough power and single USB port provides only up to 0.5 A max! (could save you some headache)
I bought enclosure with a small short cable (~5 inches) and it works fine, but if I use longer cable to extend the reach, the cable eats up power and HDD won’t work. The solution for longer cable would be so-called Y-cable, which plugs into 2 ports and draws power from both ports (0.5+0.5 A = 1 A as it says on HDD), but I guess it’s not that common to find in store. Sometimes the cable is already made like that, be sure to check web pics of the case model you gonna buy).
I successfully rescued data from dead laptop and had no problems accessing data on it (NTFS, has admin password, but no encryption/protection on My Documents folder, you mileage may vary).

By: Recovery Guy

Recovery Guy — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:04:02 +0000

Frank,

I have a SATA hard drive that was in a Dell lap top and the laptop is no more, but I have the hard drive. I am trying to read the drive on another computer with the use of a USB enclosure. It is telling me that I have 0 available and 0 stored. I understand Dell has a security on their drives is there a way to retrieve the information?

No, usually Dell laptops do not have any security enabled by default.
What operating system you had installed?

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:50:27 +0000

I have a SATA hard drive that was in a Dell lap top and the laptop is no more, but I have the hard drive. I am trying to read the drive on another computer with the use of a USB enclosure. It is telling me that I have 0 available and 0 stored. I understand Dell has a security on their drives is there a way to retrieve the information? Thanks.

By: K Lewis

K Lewis — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 02:15:07 +0000

Would these instructions also apply to an Apple laptop?

By: Recovery Guy

Recovery Guy — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:00:46 +0000

Hank,

The power connection pins broke off and the data pins are bent is there a way to fix this hard drive or get the data off of it I appreciate any help you can offer

I really doubt you can fix it at home. I guess you’ll have to use clean room recovery service. Check out DriveSavers.

By: Hank

Hank — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:44:28 +0000

The power connection pins broke off and the data pins are bent is there a way to fix this hard drive or get the data off of it I appreciate any help you can offer

Thank you
Hank

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:37:37 +0000

I have a failed laptop (Acer running XP Pro)
The disk is OK; and I have removed it and can read most files, no problem.
However one folder I cannot read, although i can list the files.

That folder was secured by changing its priveleges on the laptop to give access only to the owner, laptop administrator account, and backup operators.

I */appear/* to be able to change the ownership and security priveleges to that of the Administrator account on my other machine (Win2000) but I still cannot read the files.

Any suggestions?