Tech / Special Interest → Computer Hardware Help > [hard drive] Can't read laptop hard drive

[hard drive] Can't read laptop hard drive

My son is trying to do a laptop repair for someone, and he's trying to copy the data from their hard drive by putting it in a USB enclosure. When he tries to do that, it detects the device but says the drive isn't formatted. He says that it recognizes it just fine if it's connected to the original laptop, but not if he hooks it up to another computer. He asked me to try it in mine, and the same thing happened to me.

I'm not sure why he doesn't simply use the original device to copy the files, but he's a little more skilled than I am with these things, so I'm sure there's a logical reason. I asked him if the hard drive could possibly be encrypted, and he says he doesn't think so, but he's not 100% sure either. The laptop is running Win7, just as my machine is.

Any help would be appreciated.

Was the drive working ok previously, or was the system it was in, having troubles? Typically this will happen when you have bad sectors, something, to cause the drive to lose the partition. I'm paraphrasing here. And you may get some data off it with a linux rescue disc, but possibly may need an awful lot of time and work, if it was a problem drive to begin with.

Unless its really important stuff, I'll have a look with a linux disc and if its still knackered, give the customer the "good news".

He's already tried using an Ubuntu disc, and that apparently didn't work either.

Does the drive show up in the device manager/drive management?

I think I may have found the answer in this other thread: »[hard drive] Data recovery software for a bad Hard Drive

I'm running the Testdisk program right now, and while it's pretty slow-going, it appears to be working.