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Salvage files from hdd

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by someirish

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I have a hard drive from a dead laptop. The hard drive is still fully functioning.

What I want to do is connect the hard drive, as an external, to another machine. I have a external case etc but am having issues with booting it as an external.

All I need to do is take all my personal documents off the hard drive and copy them to the working machine.

Is this possible?

Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks in advance

5 replies

by cmiller5400

You will not be able to boot to the drive. You will be able to slave it so that you can get your files off though.

by thechas

As long as Windows sees the external drive, (USB?) you should be able to extract files from the drive.

With the external case plugged in, Windows should install the drive in the case as either an additional drive, or as a removable drive.

Just browse to the folders with your files and copy them into a folder on your desktop hard drive.

Sometimes when you used file encryption, or user passwords, you may need to enter the password to access some folders.

As to not being able to boot from the external drive, there can be many reasons. Assuming your system can boot from USB or however you have the drive connected, you are very apt to get the blue screen of death when you try to boot. This is because your hardware is different.

Chas

by oh smeg

You need to slave the Drive and copy your data off the External Drive.

But there may be some issues that you strike but as you have failed to mention the OS that you where previously using it gets a bit difficult to give you a full break down but the most obvious is that you may need to Take Ownership of your Files by following these directions

http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

If you care to post back with your Old OS everyone here can post what possible issues you may face and the work around except for File Encryption if it was used.

Col

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