Dead laptop want to recover data that was on it

Dozarrr · 16 Apr 2018

Good evening, hopefully you guys can help me out here. I had an Asus laptop (Windows 10) which recently my daughter (who is 3) decided to destroy. It was a cheap laptop so I wasn't to upset that she broke it. Before throwing it away I did remove the old hard drive. I didn't have much useful stuff on there but I did have 3 years of family photos which I would really like to recover. How do I go about doing this? I purchased a hard drive disk enclosure and plugged it into my desktop computer (windows 8). I am able to see the OS (I:and Data(J: however the data folder says 258gb free of 258gb. This doesn't make sense to me as I know there must've been some data saved. Are all my photos gone?

Clintlgm · 16 Apr 2018

You should be able to open it up just like any other drive and drag and drop or copy and paste. Are you seeing any folders and files at all? Have you searched the drive for *.jpg or *.png two typical picture formats the *. is just a wild card that asks for any files with the extension jpg or png you may be able to find where they were stored. If you know where they were stored and they are no longer there you will probably need to use some sort of recovery software. Someone else will have to comment on that I have no experience with data recovery.

Bree · 16 Apr 2018

Dozarrr said:

I am able to see the OS (I:and Data(J: however the data folder says 258gb free of 258gb. This doesn't make sense to me as I know there must've been some data saved. Are all my photos gone?

welcome to TenForums @Dozarrr

The may not have necessarily been saved to the Data drive, have a look in the OS drive under the Users folder. There should be a folder called I:\Users\your_old_username\Pictures that may have you photos in it. That would be where they were saved by default.

zbook · 17 Apr 2018

Download and install Everything:
voidtools
It will index everything on all drives.
As you type a character there will be instantaneous results displayed.
The more characters typed the narrower the search results.
Look for titles that you remember and use the *.jpg etc. endings.
There are forensic companies that can recover files even when deleted or overwritten.
The free methods are to search for the individual files or move the users folder.

swarfega · 17 Apr 2018

Perhaps you could buy a usb hard drive docking station, unplug the drive and copy tge files to another computer.

spunk · 17 Apr 2018

I purchased a hard drive disk enclosure and plugged it into my desktop computer (windows 8).

@swarfega that is exactly what the OP has done.
Anyways, as stated, you should find your pictures under the l:\Users\[username]\Pictures folder of the now external drive.

Barman58 · 17 Apr 2018

First thing to do is Go to the root of each drive tree right Click choose properties then Security Tab - Advanced aAnd change the owner of the folder (and choose the option to do the same to all child folders.

This should make the actual user files visible to you, the issue is that the way that the NTFS file system works will treat two users as different even if the user name is the same (the system creates a unique System Identifier SID for each user and compares these for access permissions. )

As an alternative you could use this .... Add Take Ownership to Context Menu in Windows 10 Windows 10 Tutorials I would always suggest that you only use this on a Live system drive when you fully understand the workings of file permissions but in a case like yours it can speed up access to the OLD drive tremendously.

Dozarrr · 17 Apr 2018

I was able to successfully recover my photos following @Bree and @spunk advice. For whatever reason when I first clicked into the OS folder I could not see any user profiles but then I turned on the show hidden files option and was able to find my user folder and all the documents inside. Not sure how or why that happened but hey got my photos and now have a nice 500gb hard drive to throw into a gaming build. Much appreciated for all the help everyone! Definitely has peaked my interest in learning and understanding computers a lot more

Bree · 17 Apr 2018

Dozarrr said:

I was able to successfully recover my photos following @Bree and @spunk advice... Definitely has peaked my interest in learning and understanding computers a lot more

Stick around TenForums then, there's a lot you can learn here. The Tutorials are an invaluable resource for a start....

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/