My sons dell laptop HARDDRIVE failed, they sent out a tech who replaced the hard drive with a new one. they have left me the old one for 7 days to allow me to try to get the data off it. I have bought a cradle and can see the drive, but have no tools to try and analyse the disk or try and recover data. any thoughts please?If you look at the drive in Windows Explorer are the files there ? ?
If so just copy/move them to another drive...You may have to take ownership of the FOLDERS & files first, however.I can see the drive, but all the folders are empty.So you can actually gain access to the folders and see that there is nothing in them? Does the available free space on the drive seem to indicate the drive is empty?How To Take Ownership of Files and Folders...sorry i am a bit confused now.. when i plug the USB cradle in with the hard drive in it... two new drives appear, like this:

RECOVERY (G:) and

Local Disk (I:)

The (G:) drive shows 9 folders all of which are empty, and when i do properties on the drive it shows it as 10GB, when the drive is actually 250GB.

When i do properties on Local Disk (I:) it comes up as 0 GB.Looks like all the data is gone except the Recovery partition...this will do you no good as those files are only for restoring the machine back to Day One status...

Do me a favor though to be sure...
Right clik My Computer and select Manage...
Then select Disk Management...

Find Local Disk I: in the right hand WINDOW and right clik it...
Select Properties...

Report back with everything it says under Properties.I tried that, and local drive (I:) does not show up at all under disk management. I am sure Jack Bower and his team on 24 could see everything on the disk, i wonder how they would do it.

Quote from: GaryDHodges on October 28, 2009, 04:17:54 AM

I tried that, and local drive (I:) does not show up at all under disk management. I am sure Jack Bower and his team on 24 could see everything on the disk, i wonder how they would do it.