Issues with mounting laptop drive in external case

[davbeisner]

My wife's older HP laptop ended up with some issues with the computer booting properly. I replaced her laptop and need to get her data off of the old laptop. I've built computers and done lots of hardware and software diagnosis and repair for years, but this one has me stumped. Probably something stupid simple I'm missing somewhere.

I pulled her 2.5" SATA drive from her old laptop and picked up an external enclosure for it that operates off USB 3.0. I've got it plugged into her new computer and I can see the drive in Disk Management and all four drive letters even show up in My Computer (new laptop is Windows 10, old one was Windows 7).

However when I try to open her main data drive (now F:\ on this laptop) it just sits and spins trying to load the file structure and doesn't bring anything up and eventually tells me that the drive is not accessible. I've also tried accessing F:\ via Command Prompt and it won't even do a CD to get me there.

The fact that it shows all the partitions and even assigned them drive letters gives me hope that the drive itself is okay, but it's just not showing any file structure on the drive at all.

What am I missing here? This is the first time I've tried to do anything like this on Windows 10. Is there anything special I need to do?

 

[mcnumpty23]

tried connecting it to the pc internally as a second drive rather than using usb?

 

[davbeisner]

Unfortunately I no longer have a desktop accessible to me or that would have been my first resort.

 

[davbeisner]

Also should note that after a while of trying it ultimately crashed Explorer.exe and I wasn't even able to get it to restart using new task from the task manager.

I also just tried plugging it to my laptop (also Windows 10) and it crashed Explorer.exe before it even launched the file explorer window.

 

[mcnumpty23]

thats a shame would be my first option

got a friend with a desktop pc you could try it in?

or another option take the drive out the new laptop put old drive in it and try to boot it into safe mode--if it does copy data to a flash drive

 

[davbeisner]

Just tried putting it back in the old laptop to copy down the error message. Last time I got a BSOD message, this time it gave me the SMART Disk warning that drive failure was imminent and to backup data ASAP. I selected Enter to continue to boot and it's actually trying to boot into Windows. Oops, now it just popped up the BSOD with the note that it is an unmountable boot volume and suggests attempting to boot into safe mode. Gonna try that and see what happens.

 

[davbeisner]

And now Windows Boot Manager on F8 is telling me that my boot selection failed cause the required device is inaccessible...

In all my years doing this I've never actually had a disk fully fail on me before I got around to upgrading it. Is this what a fully and finally failed hard disk acts like?

 

[davbeisner]

Running HP's System Diagnostics on the drive right now via the SMART disk error menu.

The error log is showing error 0301. Anybody have insight into what that error is?

I also tried running the hard disk self test and got a hard disk 1 fault code and it's unable to run a disk test. I guess I'm fried. :-(

 

[mcnumpty23]

sounds like it--guess telling you that should always have a minimum of one backup of important stuff is too late

 

[davbeisner]

LOL, indeed. I know better, too... we moved and I never got around to setting my NAS back up and now my wife has lost a bunch of photos and Kindle books that aren't accessible via Amazon. Oh well, live and learn, right?

 

[mcnumpty23]

afraid so as sending it off to have the drive platters removed to recover it would cost an arm and a leg

 

[davbeisner]

The weird thing about this is that some stuff seems to work... I did just try booting into safe mode on the old laptop and it loaded a bunch of drivers before it hit classpnp.sys and now it seems like it's giving up...

So, that tells me that it is spinning up, and that it is able to access at least a portion of the disk. So why can't I view the files with this disk mounted as a slave and copy off any accessible files? I thought when a disk died, it died, and if it wasn't fully dead, then you should be able to access at least some stuff off a host computer.

 

[mcnumpty23]

had drives do it before nothing i tried would work so gave in then tried formatting and installing windows still no joy

only other thing i have done successfully a couple of times where people were desperate is swap the drive pcb

though you need the identical pcb right down to the last detail

 

[davbeisner]

Yeah, I'm not that good...