Recovering data from WD laptop hard drive

[Mike C5]

I'm new to this and am not sure where to begin. I have an old HP laptop, Windows 10 (at least 10 years) that recently gave me warning that hard drive failure was imminent, do a back up asap. The machine would not fully boot, etc. I re-started and got into emergency back up mode and managed to get through writing a list of files to be backed up but only partially through creating those files before an error message halted progress. This seemed to get worse with additional attempts and I was never able to complete the file creation phase.

I finally removed the drive from the laptop and plugged it into my desktop machine (running Windows 7) as a secondary drive and am able to view the contents. It's labeled as a 'Recovery' drive and contains folders such as "recovery", "RM_Reserve", "hp", "preload", "System Volume Information", "$RECYCLE.BIN", "boot". The recovery folder has a log file with date (2020-12-1), a "WindowsRE" folder, and "System32" folder. These last two can't be opened (access denied message). There's also _CNBRP.FLG file, HPRP.log, Desktop.ini , lang.ini and Typelist.txt.

Does it sound like anything of value in terms of documents, photos, etc. might have been saved? Any ideas on where/how to extract them?

[pclab]

What you are seeing is the Recovery Partition (in case you wanted to restore your system to factory defaults).
The user data is not there.
Another partition should be there. If you can't see it, use a recovery software. I also highly recommend you to image the drive and work on that image.

[lcoughey]

As pclab just stated, you are not looking at the main data partition, where your data is stored. Based on your description of events, it seems likely that your hard drive is starting to crash and the drive is unable to read all the sectors necessary to access the main paritions.

If you value your data at all, it is best to stop now and seek professional assistance before further damage is caused, possibly to the point where it will not be recoverable at all.

If you wish to go it on your own, you should follow these steps:

1. get a clone/image of your failing hard drive (guide to using ddrescue)
2. scan the clone/image with a recovery program, such as Raise Data Recovery
3. save the recovered files to a new drive
4. make sure you test your files and are completely satisfied with the results before disposing of the original or erasing the clone

Of course, we at Recovery Force would be happy to assist, should you want to send your drive to us. While we do get drives from various spots around the globe, we understand that you may prefer to deal with someone a little closer to home. Let us know where that is and we would be happy to advise on a reputable lab in your region.

[Mike C5]

Thank you for the advice guys. Luckily, it isn't critical data so I can maybe learn something from doing this.

[lcoughey]

Thank you for the advice guys. Luckily, it isn't critical data so I can maybe learn something from doing this.

Let's hope so...other than the importance of backup.