How do I get files from an old hard drive? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. If you're not subscribed to my weekly email newsletter, Confident Computing,
go visit askleo.com/com newsletter and sign up today. Each week I share more tips, tricks, solutions, and information to help you
use your technology more confidently. So you've got an old hard drive or you've got a machine that won't
boot from its hard drive. But you've got data on that hard drive that you want to recover
to get off of that hard drive. What do you do? Well, there are several approaches
depending on your exact situation. I'm going to go through them in the order
that honestly, I prefer the approaches that I prefer to taking the data
off of an old hard drive solution. Number one is to actually make
it an external hard drive. Now, this requires that you understand what kind of a hard drive
you have, how big it is. Three and a half inch,
two and a half inch. What kind of interface is probably
not as big of a deal anymore. Most of them are SATA. If you're looking at an SSD M.2 is a completely different interface,
you can still do this with that. But it's not as common yet simply because it's a newer technology,
SATA is everywhere. So get an external enclosure that supports
the type of drive you have. Put the drive in that external enclosure,
and then all of a sudden you've got this nice external USB drive that you can
connect up to any computer and presumably copy off the data and other things that you
care about that were on that drive. Then after you're done with it,
you can reuse it, reformat it, use it for external storage,
start putting backups on it. Whatever. You've got yourself
a nice external drive solution. Number two, there are such things
as I'll call it a USB enclosure. Without the enclosure,
all it really boils down to is a cable that has the SATA connections at one
end and a USB connection at the other. And you connect up the naked
hard drive to this cable. And all of a sudden it appears
as an external hard drive. If you've got an internal three and a half inch drive, the bigger drives,
you may also need to make sure that the cable comes with its own power
supply to actually power the drive. The smaller drive that you might find
in a laptop uses significantly less power. It can be driven off of the cable itself,
but the larger drives need the extra power that an external power
adapter will give you. This is something that I would use if the drives aren't something that I
plan to keep using long term. It's a great temporary solution. In fact, one of these cables is just a neat tool to have in your toolbox,
because when you run across a SATA drive that is coming from a machine you don't
trust or machine that's not working. You've got this thing that will allow you to pretty much immediately connect it up
to any machine with a USB interface and start extracting the data, assuming
the drive itself, of course, is working. It's also useful if you don't
care what it looks like. I actually have, I think, two or three external drives permanently connected to cables like this
down in my basement because I don't care. They're never going to travel anywhere. They are external storage,
and I just leave them on a shelf with these kinds of cables attached, but
they're not terribly expensive cables. Just make sure you're getting the right one for the kind of drive you are looking
to use or to get the data off of. Solution number three is a little
different that involves leaving the drive in its original machine,
but then booting from something else. Typically, that means booting from a USB
version of a Linux Live distribution. These are distributions that you can boot that don't actually try to install
anything on your machine. They just boot from the USB stick
you've provided and run Linux. Then in Linux, you can then examine the contents of the hard drive on your
machine and you can copy files off to other USB devices,
or you could do whatever other kinds of things you feel like
you want to do to this. There are some Windows based recovery disks or USB sticks as well,
but the idea is the same. You're booting from something that is not going to try and install or actually
even modify your hard disk in any way. It boots up into its own operating system,
be it Linux or something else, and then allows you to examine the hard
drive of the machine that it happened to be installed on,
and that allows you to examine the hard drive of the machine you
happen to be using it on. Now I have to throw out a caveat because these techniques, they're great when they
work, but there are some things that are going to get in the way
sometimes of having them work. For example, if the drive is
encrypted well, encryption. On one hand, it's intended
to prevent exactly this right. It's intended to keep the data
on that hard drive secure so that somebody can't just steal the hard drive and attach
it to another machine so you may not be able to access the hard drives data
regardless of what you do if the drive is encrypted depending
on the encryption technology. If you're using BitLocker,
you may be able to use a recovery key. If you're using Veracrypt, you may be able to just use
the password that you already know. But the bottom line is that it's not as
simple as just plugging the drive into a machine and having it work
if the drive itself is damaged, if that's what's causing you
problems in the first place. Well, none of this is fixing the drive. All of this is giving you alternate ways of hopefully getting access
to what's on the drive. But if the reason that the machine it came
from isn't working is because the drive itself has failed, once again,
you may not be able to get at the data. This may be one of those cases where
either data recovery tools like recover or a data recovery service might be something
that you'd call into play if the data is worth it, because the recovery services,
of course, are going to cost you money. And finally, if the drive is part of a
RAID array, then you're probably screwed. And I say that because for two reasons. One, depending on the configuration of the RAID array, the drive
may only have part of the data. One of the things that RAID can do is distribute the data
across multiple drives. It could be replicating data
across multiple drives. It could be doing all sorts of interesting things in the name
of resiliency and speed. However, even if you got lucky
and the drive was, say, a drive used, I think in RAID Zero,
where everything is just mirrored, then you're still out of luck,
because most RAID controllers use their own format, which means that Windows
can't understand what's on that drive. The only way to get what's on that drive off of it is to use the exact same RAID
controller and presumably the other discs that may have been
installed at the same time. So those are the kinds of things
that can get in your way now. This would not be Ask Leo,
if I didn't say that you can completely prevent ever needing to do
any of this by backing up. If you were simply backing up that machine on a regular basis daily, for example,
then the hard drive could explode and you wouldn't care because you'd have
a recent backup of what it is that was stored on that machine,
and it wouldn't matter that you couldn't get at it later,
so definitely do back things up. Make sure you're in a position where you
never really need this for yourself. I totally understand that we are sometimes
the tech support for our friends and our family, and they may not have gotten
the backing up religion, so you may still end up finding yourself
in this kind of a position trying to recover data from a disk
that's having problems. Use this as an opportunity
to spread the word. Have them start backing up and explain
to them exactly how much they've risked by not backing up, because like I said,
there are definitely scenarios where you may not be able to recover
the information off of that hard disk. Hope that was helpful for updates. For comments for related links and more,
visit Askleo.com/139225. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.
