My sister’s hard drive went bad… real bad. The computer wouldn’t boot, not even in safe mode. On the advice of the computer guy at work, I bought her a new hard drive and installed it and reloaded windows and all her programs, and purchased a hard drive enclosure for the old drive. Everything went well, the computer is up and running fine, but of course the documents are still on the old drive…. very important documents to her.
When I plug in the hard drive enclosure, the computer recognizes drive F: and H:, and it displays the file folder skeleton, but there are no documents in there. It is a 40 GB hard drive, and drive F: says it’s 9.9 GB and drive H: says it’s 0 GB.
I’ve googled it all day and read that this is actually good news, in that it means the data is still there, I just can’t get to it. I read that one of the issues could be that I must “take ownership” of the files since they are set to be read by the old computer and I don’t have security access to them. I tried to find out how to do this in Vista, but the article on Microsoft’s website was too technical for me to understand what the hee-haw it was saying.
I am not beyond using data recovery software or a service, and I purchased a copy of Norton Ghost (although it remains unopened “just in case”), but I’ve read enough to learn that trying a bunch of stuff could just screw up the drive more, so I’m looking for some expertise customized for this situation.
When responding, please note that I’m a novice, but I follow directions VERY well as long as they’re not too full of lingo.