- [Dave] Hey, Dave here
with a video on laptop hard drive recovery.
And so here we have a hard disk drive from a laptop.
This is a 2.5-inch magnetic-based drive.
And in fact, this was the old drive in this laptop
before we upgraded to a solid state drive in here.
Now, this drive had an error.
It was an ntoskrnl.exe error.
And I show how to fix that in another video.
For this video, we just wanna recover the data
from this drive.
And so there's a couple ways to do that.
First, we could connect this drive internally
in a computer via SATA.
Or you can use an adaptor
to connect it directly to a PC or a laptop.
And so this adaptor has SATA on one end,
and that's for connecting to the hard drive.
And the other end is USB 3.0.
You can use this USB 2,0 as well
but 3.0's gonna transfer data a lot faster.
That's it.
The power's transferred via the USB port
from the laptop through here
and through the SATA 15-pin power connection to the drive.
So this'll spin up and it should spin up
and we should be able to get the data off of it.
Now, this works fine.
USB supplies enough power for a 2.5-inch drive
but if you have a 3.5-inch drive,
something internal for a PC,
and you want to get the data off of this,
this adaptor will probably not have enough power.
So you need an external power source.
And so again, you could connect this
to the inside of a computer
or if you have tray and frame combination
in the front of the system, you could use that.
But I also have another adaptor here,
and so this is for getting data off
of just about any drive.
So here we have an SATA connection,
and you would connect the SATA cable
and the other end would go to the hard drive.
And the other end of this adaptor is USB,
so you connect it to USB.
We also have old-school stuff here.
We've got 40 pin IDE for 3.5-inch drives
and IDE for 2.5-inch laptop drives.
And you'll probably come into contact
with older drives that are IDE
that people wanna get their data off of.
So a tool like this is invaluable.
But that's only the data side.
If you have these bigger drives,
for example, here's the SATA drive,
if you have these bigger 2.5-inch drives for PCs,
and here's an IDE drive,
then you need that separate power.
So a device like that comes
with a power brick
and you just connect a regular computer power cable,
an IEC power cable to an AC outlet,
and on the other end, we have a Molex connector.
So the Molex connector can work great
for older IDE drives
or any drives that use a four-pin Molex connector.
And if you have a 3.5-inch drive that has SATA,
they make these that go to SATA directly
or you can use the adaptor.
This kit comes with an adaptor.
It's a little bit of an older kit.
There we go, from Molex to SATA.
And there is a power switch on this.
So external power for that hard drive connection
if you're using the 3.5-inch drives.
So that's a great tool to have.
I can get data off of just about anything.
But we're just doing a data recovery
from this 2.5-inch magnetic-based laptop drive.
So this should be enough.
So I've got a laptop here.
The laptop that I actually upgraded.
And we're just running Windows 10 on here.
And let's take a quick look.
Here's Windows Explorer, File Explorer,
and we've got a C drive for the operating system,
and a F drive for our data.
So keep that in mind.
And so with this,
we can plug this guy in directly
right while the computer's running
but in a lot of cases, I'll shut down the system,
and then plug it in and it's generally what I like to do.
And so we'll connect that SATA connector right to the drive.
On the other end, USB
and we'll connect that to a 3.0 port
with the blue ports on the side here of the laptop.
And I can feel the drive spinning up.
I can feel it turning.
Let's see if File Explorer finds the drive automatically.
Here we go.
And it says Local Disk D.
There's a problem with this drive.
Scan the drive now and fix it.
Yeah, there's a problem.
The ntoskrnl file failed
and probably other Windows files.
But it saw it and it saw D and E.
So we've got D.
And again, it's right when I plugged it in,
it started spinning up
and you can feel it, it's vibrating right now.
You can feel the power flowing through the cable.
But anyways, we see that D drive,
that is actually the C drive
of this other hard drive.
And that's where Windows was installed
and in fact, we've got multiple versions
of Windows installed on this.
It was just a matter of time
before this magnetic-based drive failed.
And then we've got the E drive,
which has data,
and that's the kind of stuff
that we most likely would be trying to capture and recover.
And so it's looking like it works.
It works pretty good.
It's seeing the drive.
The drive is working properly
right through USB.
So that's what we want.
So let's say that we wanted to recover some of this data.
We could just copy it.
So right click on there, Copy
and we can put it wherever we need to
but I'll just put it to the C drive for now.
Let's see how fast it moves that data.
I think there's about a gig of data in there.
Okay.
And done.
Let's skip that Logins folder,
and according to my watch,
it took about 10 seconds.
10 seconds on my watch
to move a gig of data from this drive
through USB to the laptop.
So not too bad.
And that's it, that's how you recover it.
I mean, obviously, we wouldn't go to the C drive.
We'd wanna recover this to the proper location,
probably a different partition,
maybe a different drive,
maybe some type of archival.
Who knows.
But there it is.
That's how we can recover that.
Now, a couple things that you've gotta check.
Now, it could be that you're not sure
which volumes are for which drives.
If that's the case,
we can go to our Disk Management utility
with the diskmgmt.msc.
And the Disk Management utility
will look for the different drives,
the different disks so to speak.
Well, we had upgraded this laptop
and we put a solid state drive in here.
That is the drive that's running the operating system
on this laptop.
That's the main drive.
It's the first drive that should be listed, and it is.
It's called Disk 0.
So that's the solid state, 250-gigabyte drive.
With the C partition, with the operating system.
Then it's the boot.
And an F partition for data.
Then we have the second disk, Disk 1
and that is what we plugged in here.
And it does see it.
And it sees the D drive,
which is where Windows is installed on that drive
and the E drive for data that I was using previously
on that drive.
Now, in some cases,
the drive might not be recognized in Windows.
Even though you plug it in and it gets power,
Windows might not recognize it
because it has to be initialized
in Disk Management.
And you would do that by right clicking on the disk
and selecting Initialize.
And this is initialized, it does see it
and it sees the partitions
but in some cases, it depends on what's on that drive.
If there's other items on there
where there's no type of known information
or boot partition,
then it might not initialize automatically in Windows.
So you have to actually right click in the Disk Management
and initialize it.
Then it'll see that stuff.
And then you could view it within Windows Explorer.
Right? So that's it.
I mean the tools that we're using here,
it's pretty straightforward.
We're using a cable.
It's an adaptor.
Pretty cheap.
It should be in every PC technician's toolkit.
And then we're just using a computer
to copy the data to,
like a computer with Windows,
and we have to know how to use File Explorer
and Disk Management.
Right?
So there you have it.
We have copied everything over
and it's looking good.
So at this point, I'm gonna close out of here,
close out of this.
And you always want to safely remove these types of things
from USB because this is running right now.
It didn't start running until after I plugged it in,
so plugging it in while the computer's on,
not too big of a deal.
Quite often I'll keep the computer off
when I do that but not a big deal for plugging it in.
But unplugging it, no,
'cause it's running right now.
It's getting power from that USB connection.
So we want to safely remove that connection.
So we'll so that in the notification area here.
Then we'll right click on that Safely Remove Hardware
and Eject Media.
And select that guy.
This is an ASMT1051.
That's the adaptor.
Okay, we'll double check that.
So there's nothing now to safely remove.
Looks good.
But the problem with this,
as far as data goes,
this has been safely removed
but I can feel this drive is still running
and in fact, any drive that you connect
via an adaptor like this
will still get power via USB.
So the drive is still turning, it hasn't parked.
And if you care about the drive at all,
you're gonna wanna make sure that it parks properly.
So you don't wanna just disconnect it
and cut the power in that way.
You're gonna wanna do a shutdown on the computer.
And so I'll do that now.
Do a shutdown, give that a moment.
Come back here.
Okay, it's shutting down now.
I just heard it.
And the hard drive spun down
and it's not vibrating any more.
So now it's safe to actually disconnect this guy.
And always pull straight out
when you're doing that with this SATA connection.
So that's it.
Remember, to work with 2.5-inch drives,
you can use a simple adaptor like this
that goes SATA to USB,
and that can handle powering the drive
and sending the data
but if you're working with a 3.5-inch drive for a PC,
then you're gonna need something
with separate power for that 15-pin power connection
like that adaptor that I showed
with that separate power connection here.
Something that plugs into a wall outlet,
a separate power source
'cause you're gonna need more power for that.
You're gonna need SATA or Molex for other drives
and older drives,
or again, you could plug this directly inside a computer.
Just connect it to another SATA port
or use a tray and frame type of thing
in the front of a tower computer,
in a 5 and 1/4 bay.
So lots of options there.
And at this point, you know how to recover data
from just about any drive.
Now, in some cases, if the drive was really damaged,
and had seen a lot of use,
there could be corruption of files.
There could be files that are more difficult to recover.
That's when it gets a little bit more tricky
and you'll have to use data recovery software at that point.
And there's some free
and there's some that cost a lot of money.
And there's a variety of ways around that.
And there's other tips and tricks
for doing data recovery as well
that are free but that's a whole nother course unto itself.
Here I'm giving you the basics
on how to recover data from a drive
that had an issue.
But you may have to use other software
to actually go further in the recovery process.
All right, so that is it for this video.
Get yourself one of these adaptors.
It could be a lifesaver.
People will thank ya.
It should be in every PC technician's kit,
every computer technician's kit.
And that's about it.
I'm Dave signing off
and I'll see ya at the next video.