My laptop hard disk crashed along with optical drive. I have got the new parts in place now. I am connecting my old hard disk in an USB enclosure to the laptop. I cannot see the drive in My computer though it shows up in disk management as healthy. It is FAT 32.
Please help me to recover the data. Do I need any recovery software?
If the old drive appears in the disk management but not in My Computer, apparently the file structure on the hard drive is corrupted. In this case you’ll have to use data recovery software. It’s still possible to get personal files with the data recovery software even though the hard drive will not appear in My Computer.
Also, you can try this method but it’ll take some time. It’s free. Download a copy of Knoppix - live Linux and burn it on a CD. Boot your desktop (with the laptop hard drive attached to it) from this CD. The desktop will boot to a Windows-like environment and you should see the laptop hard drive icon along with the desktop hard drive icon on the desktop. Click on the laptop hard drive and find if you can see any data this way. Sometimes Linux can see what Windows cannot see. You can burn it on a CD or DVD if your desktop has two optical drives. Knoppix comes with CD/DVD burning software. Alternatively, you can transfer data to an external flash drive/hard drive formatted with FAT or FAT32 (not NTFS). You’ll have to enable writing to the flash drive/hard drive through the drive property settings.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
hi my laptop is a window xp COMPAQ presario2100 when i turn it on it says press (esc)to change boot order. press (f2) to enter system set up. and pres (f12) to enter boot lan. but if i just let it go and dont press anything it will say press (R) to repair ur pc because it is missing the file called \windows\system32\config\system. plaes respong back everything is really wierd if u dont know ll try to get mor info
June 20th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Sergio,
That could be hardware related problem, maybe the hard drive is bad or the memory module is bad. First, I would run diagnostics on both the hard drive and the memory module. For testing the hard drive you can use Hitachi’s drive fitness utility. For testing the memory module - Memtest86+. I linked to both utilities in Useful Links.
If one of the components fails, you’ll have to replace it.
If both components pass, it’s possible that you have software related problem. In this case try reinstalling Windows.