Help recovering data

[Chala]

I have a 1 TB Western Digital, Cavier Black HDD, the sata connector is shot on the drive. All my data is on there, my computer can't see the drive, but i brought the drive to repair shop, and the guy used a USB enclosure and was able to see my drive. Since it showed on a USB enclosure, if i bought one would i be able boot up to windows on it and access my files, then also if i wanted to, format it so i could send it back to Western Digital without all my data on it? Thanks

 

[tomatthe]

Would the repair shop not recover the data for you? If the connection is physically broke the more its messed with the less likely you will be able to get anything off that drive. You would not likely be able to boot windows from the usb drive without a decent amount of work. I would boot to an ubuntu live cd, then connect the drive via usb and you will need somewhere to copy the data to obviously. You should be able to format the drive from within ubuntu. If the connection is physically broken they most likely won't take it back under warranty though.

 

[Chala]

Would the repair shop not recover the data for you? If the connection is physically broke the more its messed with the less likely you will be able to get anything off that drive. You would not likely be able to boot windows from the usb drive without a decent amount of work. I would boot to an ubuntu live cd, then connect the drive via usb and you will need somewhere to copy the data to obviously. You should be able to format the drive from within ubuntu. If the connection is physically broken they most likely won't take it back under warranty though.

I didn't ask them to recover the data at the time. I was just checking to see if the drive was ok. The connector is not physically broken. What is a decent amount of work to boot from USB enclosure?

 

[tomatthe]

Try google for more info on that. I'm not actually 100% sure you can convert an already installed Win 7 into a bootable usb version. You can definitely create a bootable drive from scratch though. Creating a bootable cd, and accessing the data from that method is going to be much much simpler though.

 

[Chala]

Ok thank you, I will look into this more!