[SOLVED] Hard Drive Enclosure Issue

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lovetheforest2

Nov 25, 2018
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Can anyone tell me how to extract files from a hard drive inserted in a hard drive enclosure without having to format it on a new laptop please? I'm not a techy, but understand that formatting it will delete all the files on it, which defeats the object of the exercise. The old hard drive is from a laptop with W8.1 and I'm trying to extract to W10. TIA.
 
Solution
ex_bubblehead
Was this drive encrypted while in the laptop? If so then it must be decrypted by the same laptop before it can be used elsewhere.

Has this drive ever been dropped or bumped hard? If so there may be head/platter damage. In that case only a data recovery service will be able to attempt recovery (big buck$, and no guarantee of success)

Anything else is as USAFRet has stated.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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And if you connect this to the PC, what happens?

What is the make/model of the enclosure, and the drive.
Some, but not all, laptop size drives can run from USB only.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Then the drive would seem to be formatted in a condition that Win 10 does not recognize.
Or, it is an odd USB enclosure.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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If the drive was originally from a laptop, it should be readable in that enclosure. There's a small chance the laptop used some weird configuration Windows does not recognize outside of the laptop. But more likely the drive's contents are damaged. Both will cause the "format before you can use" message.

Try a partition manager, and see if you can see the individual partitions on the drive.
https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

If you can see the drive's partitions, the most common form of corruption I've seen which causes this error is the partition type gets set to a number which Windows doesn't recognize (if the old laptop was a Toshiba, Toshiba loved doing this - set up their boot drives in a weird single-disk RAID config for about a decade). Right-click the largest partition and select "Change Partition Type ID." If it's not 0x07 NTFS, write down what it is, and try changing it to 0x07 NTFS. See if that makes the drive contents visible. (If it doesn't work, change it back.)

Minitools Partition Wizard requires you to Apply changes before they become live. So simply completing the above steps may not be sufficient. You may need to hit the Apply button in the top left.

Ideally you'd make an image of this disk first before messing with anything. But I assume this is your only enclosure and external drive. If you're not willing to buy a second external drive for a backup, you're gonna have to take the risk of losing your data by messing with the drive. I assume the original laptop is dead, and you're trying to recover the data from its HDD?
 
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ex_bubblehead

ex_bubblehead

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Was this drive encrypted while in the laptop? If so then it must be decrypted by the same laptop before it can be used elsewhere.

Has this drive ever been dropped or bumped hard? If so there may be head/platter damage. In that case only a data recovery service will be able to attempt recovery (big buck$, and no guarantee of success)

Anything else is as USAFRet has stated.
 
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Solution
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lovetheforest2

Nov 25, 2018
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Thanks for the replies guys.
USAFret, yes you're correct.
Solandri, appreciate the response, but trying to sort out the issue with the partition manager is way beyond me.
Ah, ex_bubblehead, you may have hit on something there. I recently encrypted the old laptop as I was required to as I'm in the financial services industry. Old laptop requires recovery so there's little or no chance of that! Is there any other way to decrypt please?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Encryption, as mentioned by ex-bubb....would be the issue here.
Without the original laptop config, decryption is pretty much impossible.

If it were easy to circumvent, it wouldn't be much good.
 
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ex_bubblehead

ex_bubblehead

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Nope, it must be done on the same platform that encrypted it. If it were that easy to decrypt then why bother encrypting in the first place?
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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If you encrypted it with Bitlocker, Windows pops up a dialog strongly recommending you store a copy of the recovery key on external media like a floppy (hah) or USB flash drive, and offers to do so now. Unfortunately nobody ever does it. If you (or whoever encrypted it) had, then you could recover the contents of the drive on another computer using that key.

I too got bit by this long ago, though thankfully this was before Microsoft made it full-disk encryption only, so I had only encrypted the directories with my financial documents (lost all my old tax returns and scanned receipts). Live and learn.

If it was encrypted with on-disk encryption (feature of the HDD), then it's possible to read it on another computer if you know the password. I believe the other computer needs to support on-disk encryption though (it's been over 10 years since I last messed with one of these drives).
 
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lovetheforest2

Nov 25, 2018
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Thanks for this Solandri. We were recommended by our Financial Services network to use VeraCrypt, which was the one I used. The system does require the user to set up a rescue disc. Not entirely sure what that does! Yes, I've lost my accounts quite a few documents and photos I'd rather not lose :(
 
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