Trying to get data off old laptop hardrive for a friend-SOLVED!.

[jhansman]

So a friend, whose 3 yr. old Dell Inspiron laptop decided it would not boot any longer, went ahead an bought a new machine. I have the old drive (Samsung st1000lm024) out and am using a dongle to connect it to my computer in hopes of getting her music and docs off of it. She had her laptop set up so she had to log into Windows 10 at each use; when I try to access her user folder on my computer, access is not granted. I've found instructions on how to change ownership of a folder, but nothing so far has worked. If I try to open certain folders listed on the drive when it's connected to my PC, I get the spinning blue circle and green progress bar at the top of the window, and then any subfolders appear. However, if I try this with Program FIles (x86), no dice. "Working on it" appears at the top of the window, but the circles just spins away. Dunno if the boot sector on this drive is hosed (her old laptop flashes "Checking media-fail" at bootup, and then (of course, fails to boot). I figured the drive was dead until I connected it to my PC and saw the root directories. Any ideas on how to proceed? Stumped. TIA.

 

[edcoolio]

At a minimum you should probably start off using chkdisk first (or at least, right-click the drive in Win 10, properties, tools, check.

 

[jhansman]

I agree. Gonna do that now and will report back. Wierd that File Explorer will show the folder contents of the drive, but any attempt to move down a level fails. Windows reports an "I/O error."

 

[jhansman]

OK, this is interesting. CHKDSK reported that it could not check the drive as it was RAW. Google searches recommended running Disk Mgmt on it, which I did, and here's what came up (the drive is, apparently, disk 4). So, now what? If the file system is not NTFS, then what?

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[lakedude]

I suspect that the disk is going bad which is part of the reason you are having so much trouble. The other reason is Windows permissions. Linux does not care about Windows permissions so Linux is a great tool to use to copy stuff from old Windows drives. In your case I'm not sure Linux will help much as it appears the drive has some sort of problem.

Finally Test Disk and Photo Rec are great ways of extracting files from a drive with a bad file system. Essentially they don't care about the files system and just work anyhow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[deustroop]

Here is a remedy proposed in discussions.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...t/64a75566-0bd0-458a-b9a0-f653b0da0a16?auth=1
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19518806

 

[jhansman]

Turned out the link Jforce posted had the solution. I'll post it here, just in case anyone else runs into it:

1. Hit F2 right when the Dell Logo pops up.

2. Use your arrow keys to move to the tab named "Boot"

3. Select, with the arrow keys so that the text named "UEFI Boot" is White colored in font.

4. Navigate to the bottom, where it should say Windows Boot Manager

5. Hit F5 or 56, to move it up and down the list until you get the settings to be like:

Windows Boot Manager

UEFI Onboard LAN IPv4

UEFI Onboard LAN IPv6

6. Hit F10, and your system will reboot, without that annoying message showing up.

Sure enough, her laptop was setup with UEFI as the first choice. Once I move Windows Boot Manager to the top and rebooted, all was good. Copying her files over to a backup drive as I type this. Thanks to all who replied!

 

[lakedude]

Wow, I was way off...

 

[jhansman]

Wow, I was way off...

Perhaps not so much. After I was able to get Windows booted and started copying files off the drive, I left for a spell to let it do its thing. Came back to a sad face and a message from the OS saying some kind of STOP error occurred, an that it was gathering data for a reboot. Stayed at 0% for as long as I was willing to wait; rebooted manually and that was it: drive not found. So, I think I got lucky and squeezed the last of the needed data out, and then it died. No matter, got 90% of what we needed. This is why I am slowly moving everything over to SSDs now. Sooner or later, all drives die, but mechanical drives go first I reckon.

 

[lxskllr]

Sooner or later, all drives die, but mechanical drives go first I reckon.

I don't know about that. SSDs may be more reliable, but it seems they don't like warning of failure. You just get a big F you, and it never works again. Spinners many times will give warning if you know what to look for, and you can extract the data before it quits working.

OTOH, there's nothing like having a backup. Anything can die at any time, and a backup might be all that saves you.

 

[jhansman]

I don't know about that. SSDs may be more reliable, but it seems they don't like warning of failure.

True, and I have yet to have either kind of drive fail on me. Call it good luck or fate or whatever, this drive is the first I've worked with that just flat ass died, and bothered to warn me it would. That it coughed up a little more data for me that it could I count as luck, but yeah, there's no substitute for a backup. And, keep in mind that unless that is on optical media (not practical these days unless you use Blue-ray), even your backup may die. I use a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim USB 3.0 drive and software does an incremental on my system partition and photos every Sunday evening at 6:00 (did you get that, NSA? Just want to be sure ), so I sleep well, but if that drive goes teats up on me, I've no backup of it. Livin' on the edge...