[union_jak]

My friend is in desperate need of your help.

His laptop stopped working last week, so he bought a new one. Obviously with 4 years worth of photos, documents and music stored on the previous hard drive, he wants to retrieve them to his new laptop... problem is, neither of us know how. I've Googled for answers and no one seems to have the same problem.

He has removed the hard drive from the old laptop and used a USB lead to connect it to the new laptop. Originally, it appeared in My Computer, and when it tried to scan for errors it froze. He tried the same again with a really really old hard drive, and this worked. He managed to recover old files from the first hard drive, but not the second.

Today he has re-tried the second hard drive, and although it is showing in Computer Management, it's now no longer showing in My Computer.

I've read things about formatting etc, but surely this would wipe the drive of its contents and should be avoided?

Forgive me if this is vague, but it's not my computer so I'm just a third party trying to help out a friend.

Please bear in mind we are both technophobes so we might need to be treated like beginners regarding terminology and steps to take.

Thanks in advance

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how does the drive show up in disk management? unallocated and online or unallocated and not initialized?
[attachment=47844:look for.png]
[attachment=47845:drive online.png]


What kind of hard drive is it? part# will do


AND what OS is your friend running?

Edited by dennisK16, 15 February 2011 - 07:08 PM.

[dennisK16]

how does the drive show up in disk management? unallocated and online or unallocated and not initialized?
[attachment=47844:look for.png]
[attachment=47845:drive online.png]


What kind of hard drive is it? part# will do


AND what OS is your friend running?

Edited by dennisK16, 15 February 2011 - 07:08 PM.

[union_jak]

The other day the files were showing up, but not accessable due to it freezing up constantly.

Now it is showing as 69.88GB unallocated and 63mb allocated. It doesn't say anything about 'online' or 'initialized'. It's odd that it now says the majority of it is unallowcated as he hasn't been able to access it, so he definitely hasn't wiped anything, as far as he knows.

The hard drive is HTS541080G9AT00 80GB model.

The previous laptop was Windows XP, the new one is Windows 7.

Edited by union_jak, 15 February 2011 - 07:30 PM.

[union_jak]

Any help?

[dennisK16]

you can try to download a recovery program here.
data recovery site
if you have a XP machine try doing it on that machine

Typically, unallocated space means space on the drive that has not been "allocated" to a partition nor formatted. Basically, it is space that has not really been setup to be used by the computer yet.
i have ran in to that problem more often when trying to recover a WIN XP drive on a WIN7 PC.

[union_jak]

He has tried the recovery program, however it doesn't detect the hard drive, so it doesn't work.

[dennisK16]

let me do some research for you! i'll get back to you as soon as i know something
in the mean while you might want to try this
download

Edited by dennisK16, 22 February 2011 - 12:56 PM.

[union_jak]

Hey, any progress?

[dennisK16]

not really, sorry for the delay been pretty busy!
did you buddy try the link i posted in my previous post?

did some quick looking around in my old archives, and you might want to try this program its free and worked for me in the past recuva
let me know how it went, i will keep looking for recovery programs if this doesnt work!

or try this

recovery software

Edited by dennisK16, 06 March 2011 - 07:40 PM.

[union_jak]

My friends also been busy this week, but he will try out your links soon. In simple terms, what does the partition recovery do and would that make the laptop recognise the old hard drive?

[dennisK16]

basicly what it does is rebuilding the partition so windows or any other OS will reconize it again

[dennisK16]

My friends also been busy this week, but he will try out your links soon. In simple terms, what does the partition recovery do and would that make the laptop recognise the old hard drive?

any results ?