File Recovery from an old Laptop hard drive
Posted: 09 Nov 2014, 00:17
Hello,
Here is the situation. I had an old laptop, it recently died, not hard drive failure (my lunchpack leaked) and after i shut down the computer - i could never turn it on again. I cleaned it in and out - to no avail, it just doesn't turn on. Not sure what was exactly had happened. But anyway, it was 5 years old - i bought new MBP. All i want is to get my files back from the old laptop hard drive.
It's seagate 500gb 5400 rpm.
It has 4 partitions:
1 for system - 100gb
2 for media - 150gb and 250gb (roughly)
recovery partition which was made by when I installed windows 8.1 on it few months ago - like 100 mb
Long time ago, when I was partitioning for the first time I turned them all into Dynamic Drives. Yeah, i didn't know...
So basically today I bought the disk enclosure and connected it first to a PC in the store where I bought the enclosure. in the Disk Management it didn't recognise it, it was marked as "Inavalid". I came home, connected it to my mac. In Disk Utilities I can see 4 partitions, but they are unreadable by default. I installed TUXERA NTFS for Mac, as it claimed to be able read NTFS-3G (which as i understood was synonymous to dynamic disks).
Tuxera was able to read only the system partition "C" drive with all the folder structure, etc. Just like i would see it in Explorer in Windows. I don't really need that much from C drive, apart from few files. It also recognised and was able to mount system recovery partition. The other two with the most important data - it couldn't mount and read.
When I put "diskutils list" in the terminal thats what it gives me:
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk2
1: Windows_LDM 1.0 MB disk2s1
2: 0x27 12.0 GB disk2s2
3: Windows_LDM System Reserved 104.9 MB disk2s3
4: Windows_LDM 107.4 GB disk2s4
Now what is very strange to me is why partition sizes are so weird?
4: Windows_LDM 107.4 GB disk2s4 - this one is definitely the system drive that i have been able to access as well as the System Recovery:
3: Windows_LDM System Reserved 104.9 MB disk2s3
What happened with other 2 partitions, and why it shows 1 MB and 12.0 GB - i dont know. they should be 250 and 150.
I found TestDisk tutorial that it can change dynamic disks back to primary without messing the data and i wanted to use it for these purposes. Now, I did everything according to this instruction: http://www.allroundgeek.com/2011/05/sav ... sk-to.html
I ran few times TestDisk and it stucks at "Analyse Sector 693895168/976773165: 00%" I just closed terminal and started it all over again, just to get stuck at the same point.
It has been about an hour so far like that, stuck.
And I have a few questions:
1. Shall I just let the tool continue to run, or if it stuck - its probably an error, it wont go through?
2. Is there another way perhaps to get the data from the remaining two partitions extracted? If yes - how?
3. I have another hard drive which has like 590gb free - cloning the whole drive would be a good option? And is it going to clone the file structure as well? Or will it be like an image of the drive?
Here is the screen just in case, of where I am atm.
Let me know if you need some additional info.
Hope you can help me out.
Regards,
Aleks
Here is the situation. I had an old laptop, it recently died, not hard drive failure (my lunchpack leaked) and after i shut down the computer - i could never turn it on again. I cleaned it in and out - to no avail, it just doesn't turn on. Not sure what was exactly had happened. But anyway, it was 5 years old - i bought new MBP. All i want is to get my files back from the old laptop hard drive.
It's seagate 500gb 5400 rpm.
It has 4 partitions:
1 for system - 100gb
2 for media - 150gb and 250gb (roughly)
recovery partition which was made by when I installed windows 8.1 on it few months ago - like 100 mb
Long time ago, when I was partitioning for the first time I turned them all into Dynamic Drives. Yeah, i didn't know...
So basically today I bought the disk enclosure and connected it first to a PC in the store where I bought the enclosure. in the Disk Management it didn't recognise it, it was marked as "Inavalid". I came home, connected it to my mac. In Disk Utilities I can see 4 partitions, but they are unreadable by default. I installed TUXERA NTFS for Mac, as it claimed to be able read NTFS-3G (which as i understood was synonymous to dynamic disks).
Tuxera was able to read only the system partition "C" drive with all the folder structure, etc. Just like i would see it in Explorer in Windows. I don't really need that much from C drive, apart from few files. It also recognised and was able to mount system recovery partition. The other two with the most important data - it couldn't mount and read.
When I put "diskutils list" in the terminal thats what it gives me:
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk2
1: Windows_LDM 1.0 MB disk2s1
2: 0x27 12.0 GB disk2s2
3: Windows_LDM System Reserved 104.9 MB disk2s3
4: Windows_LDM 107.4 GB disk2s4
Now what is very strange to me is why partition sizes are so weird?
4: Windows_LDM 107.4 GB disk2s4 - this one is definitely the system drive that i have been able to access as well as the System Recovery:
3: Windows_LDM System Reserved 104.9 MB disk2s3
What happened with other 2 partitions, and why it shows 1 MB and 12.0 GB - i dont know. they should be 250 and 150.
I found TestDisk tutorial that it can change dynamic disks back to primary without messing the data and i wanted to use it for these purposes. Now, I did everything according to this instruction: http://www.allroundgeek.com/2011/05/sav ... sk-to.html
I ran few times TestDisk and it stucks at "Analyse Sector 693895168/976773165: 00%" I just closed terminal and started it all over again, just to get stuck at the same point.
It has been about an hour so far like that, stuck.
And I have a few questions:
1. Shall I just let the tool continue to run, or if it stuck - its probably an error, it wont go through?
2. Is there another way perhaps to get the data from the remaining two partitions extracted? If yes - how?
3. I have another hard drive which has like 590gb free - cloning the whole drive would be a good option? And is it going to clone the file structure as well? Or will it be like an image of the drive?
Here is the screen just in case, of where I am atm.
Let me know if you need some additional info.
Hope you can help me out.
Regards,
Aleks