Advice Needed Trying to retrieve data from portable hard drive

timo_w2s

timo_w2s

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Someone gave me a Lacie 80GB 2.5" portable hard drive to fix. The USB socket has snapped off and damaged some of the controller card in the enclosure so I thought I'd take the 2.5" SATA drive out of the enclosure and plug it into my SATA HDD USB docking station that I had used previously for transferring my old laptop hard drive to a new bigger one.

Anyway, plugged it in to the dock, and powered the Lacie HDD up and it sounded healthy enough but Windows won't recognise the hard drive as having any data on it, it just says it is zero bytes and needs formatting.

Is there some kind of security in the original Lacie enclosure that is stopping me reading the HDD in another unit? Or am I missing something else?

I don't know what format the hard disk is in, but it was being used on a Windows 7 PC until it broke and I suspect it has never been formatted by the user but it's pretty old so can't find the spec. This is the actual bare hard disk in the unit:
http://storage.toshiba.com/storagesolutions/archived-models/mk8037gsx

Is this a lost cause?
 
No idea on encryption but possibly the drive has had it. What does Windows Disk Manager say about the drive - unpartitioned/unformatted? Perhaps get some proper partition manager program (Gparted is good) and see what that says. Maybe they can rebuild the corrupt partition headers.

Alternatively, can you not simply solder the USB socket back on?
 
Captain Jack said:
No idea on encryption but possibly the drive has had it. What does Windows Disk Manager say about the drive - unpartitioned/unformatted? Perhaps get some proper partition manager program (Gparted is good) and see what that says. Maybe they can rebuild the corrupt partition headers.

Alternatively, can you not simply solder the USB socket back on?
Click to expand...

I think it just said unformatted, but will need to try it again. Certainly no messages about partitioning, but it did pop up a bubble asking if I'd like to format the drive.

I thought about soldering the connector back but the contacts are so small and close I would be soldering half of the together and I'm not sure if that is the only problem.
 
I take it the information on the drive came from being used on another Windows machine and not a Mac/Linux operating system
 
No, it's just been used on Windows systems over the years.
 
Success! I can see the hard drive and all the data using an eSATA cable from the external dock (it has both USB and eSATA out) to another laptop with a eSATA socket. Not sure why it the other PC didn't like the USB port.

Thanks for all the comments and ideas!
 
You can get replacement caddy units for about a fiver from ebay - Ive used a couple to rescue data from a laptop that had been trodden on by a small elephant toddler & destroyed the screen and damaged the motherboard.
 
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