How to copy data off a formatted hard Drive

[leadrollerz]

Hello,

My wifes e-machine recently went bad. It's either the CPU or the motherboard or both. This has been confirmed. Anyways, she has a lot of data that she needs to keep. We still have one PC that runs XP, but the others are all Vista or Win 7.

I tried to place her HDD into the other XP machine as a 2nd drive so that I could copy off her files, but the machine wouldn't recognize the drive and wanted to re-format it.

Any suggestions on how I can go about saving her data?

Thank you for your time

 

[orbitaali]

Did the BIOS recognize the drive but Windows didn't?

 

[carnageX]

^^^ The drive si being recognized, it just wants to be reformatted.

@OP: Try using a Linux LiveCD and boot off of it, and try to access the drive that way. It's worked for me in the past when Windows has wanted to format a drive or wouldn't recognize it correctly.

 

[orbitaali]

You can also try to read it in DOS with LFS support and NTFS support drivers.

 

[baih777]

I have been able to just use a usb adapter and it shows as a usb external drive. Look for one of these.

Newegg.com - Rosewill RCW-608 USB2.0 Adapter For IDE/SATA Device (Include Protection case)

 

[95BlackGA]

If this is a failing drive, you'll most likely have to use Recuva or another data recovery program. Sounds like the partition table may have been screwed up, causing the PC to want to format it.

I've had this happen before. SMART features said the drive was failing. Didn't pay attention to it, as it was just a crap back up drive. Found out I had some important pictures on it, and it failed. I couldn't get any recovery to get the files. I formatted, and used Recuva again, and was able to pull off 8000 pictures, in less than an hour.