- Jun 13, 2011
- 43
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- 18,540
Found what once looked to be a really nice laptop in the middle of the road while delivering pizzas one day. It was mostly intact but the display was broken and it did try to boot though with the still intact battery. Couldn't see anything cause of the broken display though.
So I removed the Hard Drive from it and what I want to do is go ahead and check out what's on it first then probably just nuke it and fill it with zero's and then reformat it and use it for storage. It's an HGST brand Hard Drive. 1TB SATA connection. I've since gotten a SATA to USB cable and I confirm the cable does work. On my laptop I'm running Windows XP. When I connect it to my laptop Windows does recognize the "mass storage device" as plugged in but it is not visible in My Computer. When I go to disk management in WinXP, it is listed as Disk 2, 935GB "Healthy" (GPT Protective Partition). I can't read the disk though as I've found out WinXP will not read GPT but only reads MBR.
I downloaded some "trial version" data recovery software and it scanned the drive and found all the files (and even deleted files). This trial version allowed me to recover 4000 files for free and so I picked a bunch of JPEG files to recover that turned out to be a bunch of mostly small sized what looked to be cache images from websites. No personal photos.
What I'm wondering is, is there any kind of software that will run on WinXP and read this connected drive through the USB port and boot the Operating System that's on it into a kinda virtual desktop inside a window on my WinXP machine? The Hard Drive has Windows loaded on it from looking at what the data recovery software brought up but I couldn't tell what version.
So I removed the Hard Drive from it and what I want to do is go ahead and check out what's on it first then probably just nuke it and fill it with zero's and then reformat it and use it for storage. It's an HGST brand Hard Drive. 1TB SATA connection. I've since gotten a SATA to USB cable and I confirm the cable does work. On my laptop I'm running Windows XP. When I connect it to my laptop Windows does recognize the "mass storage device" as plugged in but it is not visible in My Computer. When I go to disk management in WinXP, it is listed as Disk 2, 935GB "Healthy" (GPT Protective Partition). I can't read the disk though as I've found out WinXP will not read GPT but only reads MBR.
I downloaded some "trial version" data recovery software and it scanned the drive and found all the files (and even deleted files). This trial version allowed me to recover 4000 files for free and so I picked a bunch of JPEG files to recover that turned out to be a bunch of mostly small sized what looked to be cache images from websites. No personal photos.
What I'm wondering is, is there any kind of software that will run on WinXP and read this connected drive through the USB port and boot the Operating System that's on it into a kinda virtual desktop inside a window on my WinXP machine? The Hard Drive has Windows loaded on it from looking at what the data recovery software brought up but I couldn't tell what version.
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