[SOLVED] Trying to recover old files, please help.

[Chebron]

Once again I'm trying to get my files off of my old laptop HDD using a sata to usb 3 converter and I'm experiencing a world of issues. While it was still installed in my laptop at some point something went wrong and I was no longer able to get into windows. The drive was detected normally, however on every startup I was caught in an infinite boot cycle without ever being able to get into windows.

Now I've got the drive hooked up to my pc via usb and simply trying to interact with it causes windows explorer to become unresponsive, disk management is constantly searching for drives with no results and even youtube videos refuse to play while the drive is plugged in. Literally as soon as i unplug it everything goes back to normal right away.

I've tried to let explorer finish reading the drive before I even click on it but that is taking forever and progress seems to stop around 95% and I have no idea if it's progressing. It's a 1TB hard drive with about 700-800 gigs of stuff on it.

 

[jay32267]

I suspect there is something wrong with the drive itself because.....

"it was still installed in my laptop at some point something went wrong and I was no longer able to get into windows. "

"on every startup I was caught in an infinite boot cycle without ever being able to get into windows. "

"simply trying to interact with it causes windows explorer to become unresponsive "

I could keep quoting you....but these (to me) are all signs of something wrong with the drive.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

And this is exactly the reason you make backups of important files BEFORE you arrive at this jackpot. Your only real option at this point is to get the drive to a recovery service and be prepared to pay handsomely. Even then, do not expect 100% retrieval. Do not attempt recovery on your own, you'll only make things worse.

 

[plausible_deniability]

Sometimes I've had them work weird on a USB connection. Have you tried hooking it up inside your computer. I've taped, hot glued, zip tied etc ... them in place to extract info from them. (they ground through the PS, not through how their mounted)
There really is just two kinds of people.
Those that Back Up and
those that lie and say they do.

 

[Internet11x]

Im sorry for the , It's meant to be C : ) and E : ), but obviously written together.

This has actually happened to me before. In your case I suspect it to be a virus.
Disk management is loading forever, such as windows explorer, because it is trying to read data from your HDD that doesn't output anything. I believe that you can open cmd with your HDD plugged in and try doing "chkdsk /f" and then the letter next to your drive (for example my Windows Drive (C or my DATADRIVE 1 (D). If the letter is E: you should try doing "chkdsk /f e:. You could also type "diskpart" in CMD. If that loads forever then it's trying to read data from the HDD. If not try doing list disk and see what it's outputting.