HDD Data Transfer to New Computer

[bennreason]

Hey all,

Recently my old desktop computer died, I am pretty sure it was a power issue, not a HDD failure, as the computer wouldn't turn on at all.

I am currently trying to access the hard drive on a laptop however it is not showing up in, device manager/windows explorer.

I am running windows 10 on my latop with an SSD and a HDD.

The HDD from the old computer is a seagate Barracuda 320GB.

What are some steps I could try to access the data on the old HDD so that I can transfer it to my new computer?

If you need any more information, let me know!

Thanks in advance.

 

[B-man33]

Hi,

Have you try and allocate the HDD on your laptop?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, bennreason.

Have you checked if the drive is recognized in Disk Management or in Device Manager? If it's recognized in Disk Management, you could try assigning it a new letter, to see if it shows up in Windows Explorer (My Computer) afterwards. Here's how to do that: How to change the drive letter assignment in Windows. If that doesn't help, you could try it with a different computer, to see if the same thing happens. Another option would be to try accessing the drive via Linux Live DVD/USB in order to see if it's properly recognized and if you can recover your files.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[bennreason]

Hey, Sorry I took so long to get around to this. I lost the hard drive and only recently found it again. I just checked the disk manager and it doesn't appear to be there. How can I go about doing the Linux thing?

Thanks, and Sorry again.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

No problem, mate. Happy new year!!!

As for the Ubuntu option - this is basically a bootable, freeware, portable version of Linux. You'd just need a pen drive and to follow this tutorial: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows. Here's where you can download Ubuntu from: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop. When you create the Ubuntu stick, just plug it in one of your USB ports and restart your computer. Make sure that you've selected the flash drive from your BIOS/UEFI as first booting device. If this was properly done, you should be able to boot to Ubuntu, to see if you're able to access the HDD.
If that doesn't help you could try with data recovery software: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html and http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm.