[Mr_bossacucanova]

Hi folks

I had a Samsung laptop which developed a fault and now I need to take the HDD out of that computer and retreive the data from another computer (the sasmsung is dead!).

First, I tried simply sticking the Samusung Hard drive (A) into a different laptop - didn't work - probably couldn't boot Windows cause of a Bios difference I would imagine? no expert!

I then tried buying a 2.5 to 3.5 adaptor to try in my desktop computer - the Bios recvognised this on start-up, but computer management claims the disk is unallocated and not initalises???? (see attachment)

Same again when used in a caddy.

Does anyone know how I can retrieve the data from my hard drive using my other computer?

The hard drive was a single partition with OS, PRograms and files on it.


ANy help would be much appreciated.


Mike

Attached Files

•  disk_management.doc   53.5KB   8 downloads

[Advertisements]

Something to take note of first:

Was the laptop running XP Pro and is your desktop machine running XP Home?

If so, the laptop hard drive may be in what's known as a Dynamic State, and dynamic state hard drives cannot be read by XP Home. You will need a machine with a copy of XP Pro to be able to read it, as all XP Home will offer you is the chance to reinitialise (ie wipe) it.

But if the laptop was running XP Home, the above theory doesn't apply and it therefore would seem that the drive has either suffered a partial internal failure on its internal heads and sectors (that is, where the data is kept), or its just a bit confused. It might be worth booting off your XP CD with just the laptop drive plugged in and running Chkdsk on it.

[Neil Jones]

Something to take note of first:

Was the laptop running XP Pro and is your desktop machine running XP Home?

If so, the laptop hard drive may be in what's known as a Dynamic State, and dynamic state hard drives cannot be read by XP Home. You will need a machine with a copy of XP Pro to be able to read it, as all XP Home will offer you is the chance to reinitialise (ie wipe) it.

But if the laptop was running XP Home, the above theory doesn't apply and it therefore would seem that the drive has either suffered a partial internal failure on its internal heads and sectors (that is, where the data is kept), or its just a bit confused. It might be worth booting off your XP CD with just the laptop drive plugged in and running Chkdsk on it.

[Mr_bossacucanova]

Hi Neil,

and thanks for the reply. All computers run XP Pro with NTFS file system. Could it have something to do with the Bios? The Samsung computer the drive was taken from still has a bit of charge in the battery (the power socket is overheating hence I'm not using it anymore) and the drive is fine on the original computer. Just doesn't work on any other???


thanks again

mike

[Neil Jones]

Just read this on Microsoft's website:

Cause: The basic or dynamic disk is not accessible and might have experienced hardware failure, corruption, or I/O errors. The disk's copy of the system's disk configuration database might be corrupted. An error icon appears on disks that display the Unreadable status.

Disks might also display the Unreadable status while they are spinning up or when Disk Management is rescanning all of the disks on the system. In some cases, an unreadable disk has failed and is not recoverable. For dynamic disks, the Unreadable status usually results from corruption or I/O errors on part of the disk, rather than failure of the entire disk.

Solution: Rescan the disks or restart the computer to see if the disk status changes.

Also look at this forum post (top post) as its a similiar situation to yours only with an external firewire hard drive but the same principles apply:
http://hardware.mcse...mp;pagenumber=2