Help ! Clueless kid trying to recover data from old HDD !

r3miniscence

Reputable
Jul 26, 2015
4
0
4,510
Hello everyone !
I was clearing junk in my house today and i managed to find an old laptop which i left it lying a couple of years back ( i believe it was 2010~ when i got the laptop ). It's an acer 4820TG and i plan on retrieving old data that's left in the hard disk.
I tossed the laptop aside a couple of years back because it was unable to boot due to hard disk errors and i had no idea on how to solve it. So, today i took out the hard disk from the laptop, decided to try to connect it to a separate desktop to cheek whether the drive's still working. To my surpise, the drive was detected by the desktop and it could be opened from my computer, so when i want to retrieve the data, it asks for permission to view file ,i click yes and it goes into a long load.

So , my question, Is there any other quicker ways to retrieve the data safely ,/ should i be using apps like recuva to get my files ?
Thanks in advance ! :)
 
Solution
Yeah, sounds like bad sectors to me. You might be able to try defragmenting it, but I'm not sure how much that will help. Make sure if you have a SSD in your desktop DO NOT have it defragmented!

r3miniscence

Reputable
Jul 26, 2015
4
0
4,510


I kinda cancelled it halfway , but i was able to access other files on the hdd easily. I think there's bad sectors on the hdd which i'm not sure ..
 

Ryarwood99

Reputable
Oct 26, 2014
904
0
5,160
Yeah, sounds like bad sectors to me. You might be able to try defragmenting it, but I'm not sure how much that will help. Make sure if you have a SSD in your desktop DO NOT have it defragmented!
 
Solution

r3miniscence

Reputable
Jul 26, 2015
4
0
4,510



Yeah sure thing ! I realized that the hdd was partitioned too, its split into two partitions. Also , i went to disk management and both partitions registered as " healthy " .
So i'm currently trying to retrieve files from the hdd from recuva. It loads quickly to about 55% then it goes on a slow load , it's loading but at a VERY slow rate, i guess its searching the bad sectors of the hdd ?


 

r3miniscence

Reputable
Jul 26, 2015
4
0
4,510


Alright , thanks for your prompt reply ! I'll update when it's done loading. Hopefully it doesn't take too long !
thank you once again !
 
Hi there r3miniscence,

You can try the Ubuntu Live CD approach as well. Sometimes, this works when dealing with drives with many bad sectors. Just boot up from a CD or external drive and try to access the drive.
After you've recovered your data, you can test the drive and see what is wrong with it: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Sometimes, writing zeros(data destructive) on the drive helps. So, you can do that and retest afterwards.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD