[SOLVED] Reading an Internal hard drive from laptop in a HDD Docking Station on Win 10 Help please.

Feb 19, 2020
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Whilst I am waiting for a CMOS battery for my Toshiba C70D laptop to see if it helps with my booting problem (see other thread) I thought I'd remove the hard drive from it and see if I could just get the data off it and put it on my desktop PC. My PC is quite old, older than my laptop and only has USB2 ports and I'm not overly techy. I just got a USB 2 Docking Station and put in my laptop HDD. Win 10 can see it on my PC, Drive F as a local disk. But when I try open it, it takes forever and eventually says I need to format it. Does this mean the laptop HDD is screwed? I can hear it working in the docking station. Would it help if I tried to boot my PC using Ubuntu (I think I have done this before to rescue my PC a while back) and see if I can access anything that way? Before Some of the laptop is backed up but there's a couple of important things on there done recently I'd really like to try get back...

Any help gratefully appreciated, thank you. :)
 
Solution
Since you got the files out of it safely, toss that drive in the trash and buy a new one for your laptop. Re-using a drive with errors like that is just waiting for it to fail again.
Feb 19, 2020
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Just to update, I've just gone to try open it in Explorer and it's come up saying it isn't accessible and says the dreaded 'data error (cyclic redundancy check). From the little I know, that isn't good news is it... :(
 
CHKDSK is potentially data destructive, especially when you run it against a drive which has physical problems, eg bad heads or media. Data recovery professionals advise against it.

Instead you would be better advised to clone your drive with tools such as ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. These tools are designed to work around bad media.

In any case you should start by obtaining a SMART report using a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.
 
Feb 19, 2020
7
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CHKDSK is potentially data destructive, especially when you run it against a drive which has physical problems, eg bad heads or media. Data recovery professionals advise against it.

Instead you would be better advised to clone your drive with tools such as ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. These tools are designed to work around bad media.

In any case you should start by obtaining a SMART report using a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

Thank you for the info. I guess have been lucky because with doing all the options it showed all the bad and corrupt sectors and then did a scannow to finish things off and I'm really pleased to say that it is now all sorted. I will definitely make sure I check out the tools you mention though, they would have been my next port of call if it hadn't worked. Every day is a school day!