Using Windows to recovering data from an old Apple hard drive

[geoffgarcia]

My gf's old Apple desktop died a long time ago and she wants to recover some pictures from it.

When I opened up the computer I noticed that the HD inside is just a regular Western Digital drive (WDC WD205BA).
I was able to connect it using a standard 4 prong power cable and a regular IDE cable and hooked it up to my PC.

When I bootup my computer (Windows 7) the drive shows up in the BIOS, and when I open device manager the drive shows there as well.
However, the drive doesn't show under "My Computers", so I can't access it - which has me a bit confused.

Any thoughts on what the problem might be? and/or how I can access the disk?

This page has the disk specifications in case it matters:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/legacy/Legacy.asp?Model=WD205BA
I have the jumpers in the 9 pin single mode at this time (no other IDE devices connected to the PC at this time).

When I go to the device properties window (from Device Manager) of the drive and go to the Volumes tab, it says that the type is Unknown, the status is "Not Initialized", the partition style is Not Applicable. However it does detect the capacity (19574mb), and detects 0 for unallocated and reserved space.

 

[geoffgarcia]

I just found the following on the Windows 7 documentation site:

A basic or dynamic volume's status is Unknown.
Cause: The Unknown status occurs when the boot sector for the volume is corrupted (possibly due to a virus) and you can no longer access data on the volume. The Unknown status also occurs when you install a new disk but do not successfully complete the wizard to create a disk signature.

...

A basic disk's status is Not Initialized.
Cause: The disk does not contain a valid signature. After you install a new disk, the operating system must write a disk signature, the end of sector marker (also called signature word), and a master boot record or GUID partition table before you can create partitions on the disk. When you first start Disk Management after installing a new disk, a wizard appears that provides a list of the new disks detected by the operating system. If you cancel the wizard before the disk signature is written, the disk status remains Not Initialized.

Solution: Initialize the disk. The disk status briefly changes to Initializing and then Online status. For instructions describing how to initialize a disk, see Initialize New Disks.


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771775.aspx#BKMK_2

 

[geoffgarcia]

I opened the "Disk Management" utility per the instructions in my previous post and set the partition of the disk to Master Book Record (MBR) and now the disk is showing as Online within the device properties, but still not showing under the My Computer area...getting closer

 

[geoffgarcia]

The entire disk is currently unallocated within the disk management utility.
I have the options of making new simple, spanned or striped volumes, but that sounds an awful lot like it would be formatting the drive?

Not sure what my next step should be, and hope that someone can give me some direction from here! Thanks!

 

[sub mesa]

You probably corrupted the data on the disk by initializing it. Any hope for easy recovery is proably lost as good data has been overwritten by Windows.

If the data is truely important, disconnect it now and take it to an expert. I can't help you with reovering older mac (pre-OSX) partitions, but its probably HFS. You may have lost the ability to recover your data by initializing as that overwrites data on the drive.

 

[geoffgarcia]

Problem solved:

I installed MacDrive 8, a Windows based application that reads Mac files, and it instantly detected the drive and I was able to copy everything from the old drive to the new one.

 

[sub mesa]

That's fantastic news! You're actually quite lucky i guess. Probably because i don't know how old macs label their disks. With RAID and stuff you would have lost your data by now.

Please, make sure you make backups in the future - you may not be so lucky next time.

Cheers!