Need HELP with computer

[Colin_T]

I need help getting data off a new sata hard drive and putting it on an external drive. The problem is the laptop that the drive was in, has died and I am using a sata docking bay connected to an old P4 via a USB cable.

The docking bay appears to have installed ok but there is no new drives showing in Windows Explorer. I have A: C: D: E:.
A is the floppy drive, C & D are the IDE HD in my P4, and E is my DVD burner.

If I right click My Computer and go to Manage, it opens a window called Computer Management.
In Computer Management, I scroll down to Storage and then Disk Management, and the new drive is in there. However, it does not have a letter assigned to it and there are no tasks I can do with it except Help, which is useless.
I have attached a picture of Computer Management

The drive has GPT Protective Partition. I assume that is the problem.
I assume the new drive has 2 partitions because it had C & D on it and I stored stuff on the D: because the C: didn't have any spare space on it. I'm pretty sure C was the operating system because it had the system and windows files on it.

The only options I have for this drive is to partition & format it and I am not doing that because I need the information on the drive. It has legal information about a court case that is ongoing and I really need the info, otherwise I am fuplied.

How do I get the data off this drive when it is not showing up in Windows Explorerer/ My Computer?

 

[kiko]

have you tried mounting the drive on a linux distro? you can grab a live ubuntu or something which is easy for beginners to linux...
2nd option...you can convert the gpt table to mbr (if done wrong bye bye data...then after only with unformat/undelete type of programs to recover files)
3rd option ---> MiniTool Power Data Recovery

 

[PheonixKingZ]

@Oblio is an engineer I believe, he may be able to help.

 

[Oblio]

Sorry, I used to be savvy on Unix (HP-UX and SGI), VxWorks, and some proprietary OS and assembly languages. Now I just get my IT guy to solve any problems. Now, if you had a radar system or embedded microcontroller issue, I might be able to help.

 

[The603]

Same with me, our IT department takes care of these things, sorry.

 

[Oblio]

I'll channel my IT guy ...

Did you reboot after connecting the new hardware?

Usually used to buy him time to research the issue , but often fixes the problem.

 

[Colin_T]

Yes I rebooted the computer.

I use windows not linux.

Anyway, this issue appears to be linked to windows xp. I have dragged out my old laptop and that has windows 10 on and I have been able to get some of the data off the sata HDD but it only shows the D: drive and not the C: drive. The legal documents and my fish forum stuff is on the C: drive.

Anyone know how I can find the C: drive on the sata drive?

Anyone know how I can boot from the USB drive?

 

[Oblio]

Is there any chance you can get it to boot with your old laptop drive on a computer with a SATA interface? Set the jumpers on the host PCs original drive to not boot from that drive. If that works, copy your files onto a thumb drive.

 

[kiko]

Yes I rebooted the computer.

I use windows not linux.

Anyway, this issue appears to be linked to windows xp. I have dragged out my old laptop and that has windows 10 on and I have been able to get some of the data off the sata HDD but it only shows the D: drive and not the C: drive. The legal documents and my fish forum stuff is on the C: drive.

Anyone know how I can find the C: drive on the sata drive?

Anyone know how I can boot from the USB drive?

I thought you said it died...
you can change the boot order in the bios
or you could simply remove the external drive boot from it and then plug the external drive once you're inside windows...also I wouldn't advise you to boot from it...
get a live linux iso...if you don't know linux then start learning some...there's no live windows and even if you could make it a temporary onboot install for any windows OS it would require a samba server / nfs server etc... which would require again...guess? linux...
so easiest way to get your stuff is to use your old laptop with the drive in the same slot as you had it before
get a ubuntu live distro ---> https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/try-ubuntu-before-you-install#1-getting-started (it's known for being one of the easiest linux distros around)
boot the laptop from the cd or pen drive or wherever you put the .iso into... you can use "poweriso" or "rufus" to do this in windows
once inside the desktop area you can open up a terminal and sudo into root and 'mount' the c and d partitions into a temp folder
then plug your external
so once you're inside a terminal it should look something like this:

then you gotta become "root" or in windows terms... "Administrator" user
so you type: sudo su -l root
to become root...then you need a list of partitions of your drive
sata drives in linux are usually SD* and they're located in /dev/ so a command like "ls /dev/sda*" if A doesn't work try a few more letters in the alphabet
it could be /dev/sda* /dev/sdb* /dev/sdc*
this is literally just to find out which letter the linux kernel assigned to it
then you can list the partitions on that drive with "fdisk /dev/sdX -l"
so if the drive is the letter A the command would be fdisk /dev/sda -l
and you'd get a screen like this:

which you can easily see the partition sizes and easily see which partition has a capacity of 24gb (your C partition)
then you create a local temp folder --> mkdir /mnt/mycdrive
and then mount the partition to it ----> mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/mycdrive -o force
once you have achieved this you can plug your external drive and mount it the same way (in a different temp folder of course)
and copy your files using whatever desktop file explorer ubuntu ships with these days...
you could still use the terminal to do all this but I'm pretty sure if you're trying to avoid linux you'd be better off using the desktop type
or maybe just grab a friend that knows linux and have him/her do this for you in exchange of a pizza and chill xD
also specially with old drives with gpt issues....you mentioned connecting the drive via whatever box/adapter/wire you're using via USB...
have you tried connecting it internally inside a computer tower straight to the motherboard instead of usb? usb sometimes is finicky like that
and a drive that could be probably fine not work through usb but work 100% if connected straight to the board
if your newer computer doesn't have an ide connection you can get an ide to sata on amazon ---> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RSHKNXP/?tag=ff0d01-20
at 8 bucks... maybe even cheaper on ebay or something
good luck and let us know how it goes

 

[raylove]

Your problem sounds a bit more complicated than one I had recently, but mine was a simple fix so might be worth a try. My Win 10 computer wouldn't recognise external drives at all. All I needed to do was run the troubleshooter and it fixed it. It happened again after an update but I fixed it again and since them, no further problems.
The thing is, Microsoft in their wisdom have hidden the troubleshooter! This is how you find it:
1 open the command prompt by typing CMD in the search box
2 when the black window opens type in. msdt.exe -id DeviceDiagnostic
exactly as shown and hit enter. The troubleshooter should launch. Just work your way through it and hopefully it will fix your problem like it did for me!