Today I'm going to show you how I go about
recovering data from a dead computer.
Now by dead I mean that when I press the power button nothing happens; you see
nothing on the screen
and no lights come on.
Now a lot of people, when they have a computer doesn't start up and
nothing comes on the screen when they press the button, they assume that they lost
everything on the hard drive. But that's not actually the case.
If the hard drive has failed you can indeed lose everything
but if the hard drive had failed
we would actually see different symptoms.
If the hard drive of a computer has failed you typically will see something on
the screen when you press a power button
typically a power on self test or maybe a logo.
In this case this is a Dell computer so a dell logo would probably
appear on the screen.
so the fact
that nothing happens when you press the button
usually indicates that
the problem lies somewhere else; in other words it might be a motherboard problem
or processor or ram problem or something like that. So we are gonna assume that our
hard drive is probably okay and so
that means we can actually remove the hard drive from this machine,
plug it into another machine, and try to retrieve the data.
So let's get started.
Usually on a laptop it's not too hard to find the hard drive.
There are exceptions to that but usually one of these panels on the back
is the harddrive. In this case the hard drive is actually right here on the side.
If I just pull this out I
beleive the hard drive will be in there.
Occasionally you get a laptop that you need to remove the keyboard on the top of it
in order to get to the drive but that has become pretty rare on the modern laptops.
So here I'm going to go ahead and remove the hard drive.
Now this hard right here
is actually in a tray
which has a special connector on the back this is not a standard
connector.
but the hard drive itself is standard and will usually be the case
with any hard drive you have.
So I'm gonna go ahead and
take the hard drive out of the tray
and that will expose the industry standard connector on the back
and that way I can hook it to another computer.
Here I have the hard drive out and it has a standard IDE connector - the old
type - the newer drives have something called serial ATA or SATA
which looks somewhat different than this.
But this old one is a standard connector too. Some of the newer computers may
not have a place to attach a drive like this
but I have a computer here in my work room that I can attach it to.
The problem is
with the older type connector, desktop hard drives and laptop hard drives
.. the connector is different
and so
here I am trying to connect a laptop hard drive to a desktop machine to do data
recovery
and I'll need to use an adapter in order to connect it.
Now with the newer SATA connections
both laptop
hard drives and desktop hard drives have the same type of connector - they are
exactly the same with SATA
and so for that reason
you don't need an adapter of any kind
when you hook one up to the data recovery like this.
Ok, here you can see that I have my workbench computer opened up
and I have disconnected the CD-ROM drive and I have the IDE connector
and the power connector here to attach the laptop hard drive.
Now as I said
that connector is incompatible with the laptop drive
.. the connection on a laptop drive a somewhat different ..
and so that's where this adapter comes in so I can attach a laptop drive
to a desktop computer.
Now an adapter like this is readily available if you do a search on Google
or Amazon. You should find one of these for relatively cheap.
I don't know how long they will be around though because SATA connections are really
commonplace today and so the older these computers get,
the less demand there will be for adapters like this. So if you're going to
work on old computers
it might be best that you get one of these before they disappear.
Ok, I have the drive hooked up to the desktop comptue so I'm going to fire it up
and see if I can get the data off.
Ok, here I have the computer running and I am looking at the My Computer window
there are three drives listed here: drive C, D and E.
Now I happen to know
based on the size that is reported down here when I click on these
that this one,
Drive D, is the one that i actually connected.
These two here,
E and C, are
hard drives that were already attached to my computer. So this one I need
and the fact that it is showing up here is real good sign when it comes to
getting data off. So I'll double-click on it
and I see a My Documents folder right in the root of the drive that must
mean that they were using Windows 98 - this was an older
computer.
If we were using Windows XP we wouldn't find the My Documents folder in the root folder.
I'm just going to go in there and see what I can find.
Looks like there's a lot of
stuff - this looks good.
It looks like we are going to be able to retrieve some data off of it.
I'll have to rummage around a little bit and figure out
where all the information is that they need
and then I'll just copy it over to a usb flash drive or something
to give it to the customer to put on their new computer.
Thanks for watching today's video episode of Bernardo's Tech Blog
Feel free to stop by our blog site at www.bernardotech.org.
And as always thanks for watching and I'll see you next time