Portable hard drive doesn't show up in "my computer"

[blakeandrewdixon]

My laptop died and I retrieved its hard drive (Seatay 2.5" SATA) and put it in a hard drive case to try and retrieve some of the laptop's files. When I plugged the hard drive into my computer (Windows 7) a notification on the toolbar said the system detected a new device by USB and is installing the drivers for it. After the drivers installed I went to "my computer" assuming the drive would be accessible from there like when I plug in a flash drive. Nothing showed up, only the C drive (and the dvd and cd drives) were visible.
I used windows+r and opened "diskmgmt.msc" and three new volumes had appeared with the primary partition label. Basically my disk management had:
Disk 0: 100MB Healthy (EFI System Partition) // (C 931.29 GB NTFS, Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Disk 1: 512MB Healthy (EFI System Partition) // 927.13 GB Healthy (Primary Partition) // 3.89 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)
When I right click on any of the disk 1 volumes the only options that aren't grayed out are "delete volume" and "help"
One of the volumes had a capacity of 927.13 GB and 927.13 GB worth of free space which makes me worry the drive has lost all its data somehow.
I haven't tried using the hard drive on any other systems yet. I intend to try it on a system running RHEL tomorrow. Is the drive still functional? And if it is how can I access my files?

EDIT: Tried using my drive on a RHEL PC. The device appears in Dolphin file explorer under "Devices" as "927.1 GiB Removable Media." When I open it it displays the root folders: bin, boot, cdrom, dev, etc. And the files initrd.img, initrd.img.old, vmlinuz, vimlinuz.old.
When I open 927.1 Gib Removable Media/home/blake no contents are displayed and the error message "Could not enter folder /db3498dd-b9a4-4e27-9cfe-66f3cdefc085/home/blake"

 

[popatim]

Whats the make and model# of the actual sata harddrive?
Soulds like it might be an encrypted drive.

 

[blakeandrewdixon]

Whats the make and model# of the actual sata harddrive?
Soulds like it might be an encrypted drive.

0J42231DA64390P45
S/N: SSG26JNK

HDD: Z5K1000-1000
HTS541010A7E630
Type TT5SAF100
SATA 6.0Gb/s
5400RPM 1TB
P/N: 0J42231
MLC: DA6439
FW: 4A0

 

[popatim]

While that drive was available with TCG Opal encryption, because the model# ends in a 0 this isn't one of them.

Have you tried running TestDisk and seeing if that can work with the drive?

 

[blakeandrewdixon]

While that drive was available with TCG Opal encryption, because the model# ends in a 0 this isn't one of them.

Have you tried running TestDisk and seeing if that can work with the drive?

I've never used testDisk before. But after downloading it I found it could at least work with the drive. My experience using testDisk is written below.

I downloaded testdisk_win.exe (7.1) and selected the portable drive
>Disk /dev/sbd - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - USB

A list of partition table types appeared.
The command line said "Hint: EFI GPT partition table type has been detected" so I selected the EFI GPT partition map option.

Selecting this option displayed the following information:

Disk /dev/sbd - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - USB
CHS 121601 255 63 - sector size=512

and provided the following options

>[ Analyse ]
[ Advanced ]
[ geometry ]
[ options ]
[ quit ]

I selected analyse. Which then displayed 3 Primary partitions named EFI System, Unknown, and Linux Swap. Two options were available: Quick Search and backup.

I selected option quick search.

A line labelled Analyse cylinder 121090/121600: 99% appeared and the first number was increasing by 1 about every 1 second. A stop option was available but I waited for the number to reach 121600/121600: 100%

Now there are two partitions to select from set to primary, that can be swapped from primary to deleted and back using the left and right arrow keys. The cl says Structure: ok. The following options are available: add partition, load backup, change type, list files, continue.
The two partitions available are EFI System and MS Data.

With the partition P MS Data highlighted I selected the continue option.

This gave the options: quit, Deeper Search, and Write.

I selected deeper search and it started searching all the cylinders.
By cylinder 45, four warnings has shown up:
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 16 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
warning: number of sectors per track musmatches 2 (NTFS) != 63 (HD)
MS DATA 242011 248184 6174
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 16 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
warning: number of sectors per track musmatches 2 (NTFS) != 63 (HD)

It looked like it was going to take 33 hours to search all the cylinders so I stopped the deep search.

Now there were a ton of partitions named MS DATA available, in addition to the EFI System which was still there.

I discarded the results and returned to a state where I would have to wait for it to analyse the first 600 cylinders again so I stopped using testDisk. Will try using it again tomorrow.

 

[popatim]

If you can, I would begin by making an image of the drive. You will need another drive with 1tb of free spece for this image. The image creation tool is under the Advanced menu.
I would save the image just under the root directory in a folder named 'Images' for ease later on. {example - N:\images\some_easy_to_type_name.img}

Once you have an image, store the drive sonmewhere safe, we can now work with Testdisk using the image.

I would Analyze, and then Select the MS Data partition, use TYPE to change to NTFS and see what it finds on a quick scan. Please be aware, ahread of time, that you will need another drive to recover files to if you are recovering from the problematic HDD.

And lastly, yes deeper search takes an enormous amount of time. I've only had limited success with it but then my customers usually have written to the drive attempting to 'fix' it.

 

[blakeandrewdixon]

If you can, I would begin by making an image of the drive. You will need another drive with 1tb of free spece for this image. The image creation tool is under the Advanced menu.
I would save the image just under the root directory in a folder named 'Images' for ease later on. {example - N:\images\some_easy_to_type_name.img}

Once you have an image, store the drive sonmewhere safe, we can now work with Testdisk using the image.

I would Analyze, and then Select the MS Data partition, use TYPE to change to NTFS and see what it finds on a quick scan. Please be aware, ahread of time, that you will need another drive to recover files to if you are recovering from the problematic HDD.

And lastly, yes deeper search takes an enormous amount of time. I've only had limited success with it but then my customers usually have written to the drive attempting to 'fix' it.

I'll see if I can get a 1TB drive to store the image on. If I can't get one I can still attempt to fix my faulty drive right? I'll just be risking messing up the original drive.
As far as I know I haven't written anything to the drive.
Also with the information available so far can we confirm that the reason my laptop stopped working was because of the hard drive? I didn't take it in to a shop to have it looked at but I did call one and they suggested the problem was probably a fault with the motherboard.