Recover Data From Laptop Drive

[Symoz]

I'm trying to recover data from a hard drive that was in a laptop that won't boot (Lenovo Win7). I've purchased a StarTech usb>sata hd enclosure and have successfully removed the drive from the DOA and inserted it into the enclosure. When I plug the drive into the host computer (Win10), the DOA drive shows several file folders, Recycle Bin, Boot, MFGSTAT, Recovery, System Volume Information, and the four files; bootmgr, bootnxt, bootsect and sdrive.

What I would like to recover would be any of the documents, images and preferably the .pst file from Outlook. My problem is that none of the file folders contain any large files and the drive won't let me access the System Volume Information. I do have admin rights on the host computer and would have also had the same on the DOA computer, but the error message that comes up is "E:\System Volume Information is not accessible. Access is denied."

Can anyone assist me with where I may be going wrong?

Thanks!

 

[BadAsAl]

Do you have any other drives showing up when you plug the external drive in, other than E:? You may be looking at the recovery partition and not the Windows installation partition.
Typically all users files are stored on C:\Users (if C:\ is the drive letter of the Windows install partition). So look at all the partitions that show up when you plug the drive in and see if you see any with a Users folder and a Windows folder and also Program Files. This would indicate you are in the correct partition and you can look the data there.
System Volume Information won't have any user files in it so don't bother trying to gain access.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

I would advise testing the usb hard drive using western digital data lifeguard 4 windows or Seagate equivalent before proceeding further

P
This tests for physical damage
If there are no problems or only a few bad sectors you can try data recovery your self

It the reports are that physical damage has occured stop testing , shut down and disconnect usb drive and get more advise

If you have problems with folder permissions you could boot the pc up from a linux rescue cd or usb disk which will ignore windows access permissions

Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[rgd1101]

What does it show up in disk management?