File extraction from slave drive

[vickerss]

Hello,
I have an external hdd which I have extracted from it's case. I have made it a slave drive on a PC and it is recognized by the bios correctly. The hard drive does not show up in My Computer. I am trying to extract the files if possible.

 

[geofelt]

You need to make it available to windows.
Go to control panel/administrative tools/computer management/storage/disk management/
you should see your drive where you can make it active, and give it a drive letter

 

[vickerss]

The disk shows as healthy and active, but no drive letter. I really need to make sure I don't format it by mistake and lose the data. How do I assign a drive letter?

 

[vickerss]

The assign drive letter is greyed out.

 

[fzabkar]

What was the original enclosure?

Some external HDDs are encrypted, others use 4KB LBAs rather than 512-bytes, while still others may use Linux or Mac file systems.

 

[vickerss]

Definitely windows, not MAC or Linux. The original casing was acomdata.

 

[fzabkar]

AcomData make lots of external products. Some are encrypted ...

Can you show us the contents of sector 0? This will tell us what kind of OS and partitioning system was used, and whether the data are encrypted.

Depending on your version of Windows, you may be able to see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

If you extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file, then this will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

Otherwise, you could use a sector editor to dump sector 0.

Roadkil's Sector Editor:
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P24/Sector%20Editor

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:
http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

 

[vickerss]

Thanks this is good info and I will save it for future reference. Unfortunately the client was in a bit of a hurry and has decided to try someone with a little more experience. I appreciate the help though.