How do I get files from an old hard drive?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com.
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So you've got an old hard drive or you've
got a machine that won't boot from its hard drive.
But you've got data on that hard drive
that you want to recover to get off of that hard drive.
What do you do?
Well, there are several approaches depending on your exact situation.
I'm going to go through them in the order that honestly, I prefer the approaches
that I prefer to taking the data off of an old hard drive solution.
Number one is to actually make it an external hard drive.
Now, this requires that you understand
what kind of a hard drive you have, how big it is.
Three and a half inch, two and a half inch.
What kind of interface is probably not as big of a deal anymore.
Most of them are SATA.
If you're looking at an SSD M.2
is a completely different interface, you can still do this with that.
But it's not as common yet simply because
it's a newer technology, SATA is everywhere.
So get an external enclosure that supports the type of drive you have.
Put the drive in that external enclosure, and then all of a sudden you've got this
nice external USB drive that you can connect up to any computer and presumably
copy off the data and other things that you care about that were on that drive.
Then after you're done with it, you can reuse it, reformat it,
use it for external storage, start putting backups on it.
Whatever. You've got yourself a nice external drive solution.
Number two, there are such things as I'll call it a USB enclosure.
Without the enclosure, all it really boils down to is a cable
that has the SATA connections at one end and a USB connection at the other.
And you connect up the naked hard drive to this cable.
And all of a sudden it appears as an external hard drive.
If you've got an internal three and a half
inch drive, the bigger drives, you may also need to make sure
that the cable comes with its own power supply to actually power the drive.
The smaller drive that you might find in a laptop uses significantly less power.
It can be driven off of the cable itself, but the larger drives need the extra power
that an external power adapter will give you.
This is something that I would use if
the drives aren't something that I plan to keep using long term.
It's a great temporary solution.
In fact, one of these cables is just
a neat tool to have in your toolbox, because when you run across a SATA drive
that is coming from a machine you don't trust or machine that's not working.
You've got this thing that will allow you
to pretty much immediately connect it up to any machine with a USB interface
and start extracting the data, assuming the drive itself, of course, is working.
It's also useful if you don't care what it looks like.
I actually have,
I think, two or three external drives
permanently connected to cables like this down in my basement because I don't care.
They're never going to travel anywhere.
They are external storage, and I just leave them on a shelf
with these kinds of cables attached, but they're not terribly expensive cables.
Just make sure you're getting the right
one for the kind of drive you are looking to use or to get the data off of.
Solution number three is a little different that involves leaving the drive
in its original machine, but then booting from something else.
Typically, that means booting from a USB version of a Linux Live distribution.
These are distributions that you can boot
that don't actually try to install anything on your machine.
They just boot from the USB stick you've provided and run Linux.
Then in Linux, you can then examine
the contents of the hard drive on your machine and you can copy files off
to other USB devices, or you could do whatever other kinds
of things you feel like you want to do to this.
There are some Windows based recovery
disks or USB sticks as well, but the idea is the same.
You're booting from something that is not
going to try and install or actually even modify your hard disk in any way.
It boots up into its own operating system, be it Linux or something else,
and then allows you to examine the hard drive of the machine that it happened
to be installed on, and that allows you to examine the hard
drive of the machine you happen to be using it on.
Now I have to throw out a caveat because
these techniques, they're great when they work, but there are some things that are
going to get in the way sometimes of having them work.
For example, if the drive is encrypted well, encryption.
On one hand, it's intended to prevent exactly this right.
It's intended to keep the data on that hard drive secure so that somebody
can't just steal the hard drive and attach it to another machine so you may not be
able to access the hard drives data regardless of what you do if the drive is
encrypted depending on the encryption technology.
If you're using BitLocker, you may be able to use a recovery key.
If you're using Veracrypt,
you may be able to just use the password that you already know.
But the bottom line is that it's not as simple as just plugging the drive
into a machine and having it work if the drive itself is damaged,
if that's what's causing you problems in the first place.
Well, none of this is fixing the drive.
All of this is giving you alternate ways
of hopefully getting access to what's on the drive.
But if the reason that the machine it came from isn't working is because the drive
itself has failed, once again, you may not be able to get at the data.
This may be one of those cases where either data recovery tools like recover or
a data recovery service might be something that you'd call into play if the data is
worth it, because the recovery services, of course, are going to cost you money.
And finally, if the drive is part of a RAID array, then you're probably screwed.
And I say that because for two reasons.
One, depending on the configuration
of the RAID array, the drive may only have part of the data.
One of the things that RAID can do is
distribute the data across multiple drives.
It could be replicating data across multiple drives.
It could be doing all sorts of interesting
things in the name of resiliency and speed.
However, even if you got lucky and the drive was, say, a drive used,
I think in RAID Zero, where everything is just mirrored,
then you're still out of luck, because most RAID controllers use their
own format, which means that Windows can't understand what's on that drive.
The only way to get what's on that drive
off of it is to use the exact same RAID controller and presumably the other discs
that may have been installed at the same time.
So those are the kinds of things that can get in your way now.
This would not be Ask Leo, if I didn't say that you can completely
prevent ever needing to do any of this by backing up.
If you were simply backing up that machine
on a regular basis daily, for example, then the hard drive could explode
and you wouldn't care because you'd have a recent backup of what it is that was
stored on that machine, and it wouldn't matter that you couldn't
get at it later, so definitely do back things up.
Make sure you're in a position where you never really need this for yourself.
I totally understand that we are sometimes the tech support for our friends and our
family, and they may not have gotten the backing up religion,
so you may still end up finding yourself in this kind of a position trying
to recover data from a disk that's having problems.
Use this as an opportunity to spread the word.
Have them start backing up and explain to them exactly how much they've risked
by not backing up, because like I said, there are definitely scenarios where you
may not be able to recover the information off of that hard disk.
Hope that was helpful for updates.
For comments for related links and more, visit Askleo.com/139225.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
askleo.com. Thanks for watching.