Question Will my old HDD still work?

[el_yel_]

I don't remember the exact date, but back in 2010-2012 I bought my first laptop. The HDD that came with it broke in 2015, so I bought a new one, which broke in August of 2017, but by that time much of the hardware didn't work properly anymore, so I only kept a few items that I might use in a new computer and trashed the rest.

So I got one of these two HDDs here. I THINK it's the 2015 one, because the latest date I could've possible got the original HDD is September 2012, and the manufacturing date is September 4th, 2012, and it's very unlikely that it got integrated into a laptop and sent to my door that quickly. Also, there would've been no reason for me to keep the original disk because it broke completely, while the new one "just" got excruciatingly slow.

So May last year I got a new laptop, and I noticed it's using the same HDD ports as the old HDD in front of me. I haven't plugged it in since 2017/2015. Is it still possible to recover data from it by plugging it into my new laptop and firing up an Ubuntu live DVD?

 

[USAFRet]

Will it work? Can't know until you try.

I would get a SATA dock instead of installing it internally.
Assuming the drive is accessible, where would you copy your data to?

 

[el_yel_]

Will it work? Can't know until you try.

I would get a SATA dock instead of installing it internally.
Assuming the drive is accessible, where would you copy your data to?

I didn't want to go through all the trouble of installing it if it's too unlikely to still be working. I don't know much about the technicalities of HDDs, and whether not plugging them in for years has too much of an effect on data longetivity.

I would back it up to my external USB hard drive

 

[USAFRet]

I didn't want to go through all the trouble of installing it if it's too unlikely to still be working. I don't know much about the technicalities of HDDs, and whether not plugging them in for years has too much of an effect on data longetivity.

I would back it up to my external USB hard drive

Sitting on the shelf for several years?
It will probably work. Probably.
No guarantees either way, but I'd lean to Yes.

 

[el_yel_]

Sitting on the shelf for several years?
It will probably work. Probably.
No guarantees either way, but I'd lean to Yes.

So I got an external HDD reader, and the good news is that the drive is detected, and Explorer shows three partitions. The bad news is that none of these partitions are accessible when I try to open them, and trying to do so stalls all Explorer operations. In an Ubuntu 19.04 live session I was able to access one of the partitions, and the only folder on it is the usual System Volume Information. So I fired up Recuva, and as expected it can't access any of the three partitions either. Will a quick format on all three partitions reduce the chance of successful data recovery? Planning to run Recuva after doing so.

 

[USAFRet]

So I got an external HDD reader, and the good news is that the drive is detected, and Explorer shows three partitions. The bad news is that none of these partitions are accessible when I try to open them, and trying to do so stalls all Explorer operations. In an Ubuntu 19.04 live session I was able to access one of the partitions, and the only folder on it is the usual System Volume Information. So I fired up Recuva, and as expected it can't access any of the three partitions either. Will a quick format on all three partitions reduce the chance of successful data recovery? Planning to run Recuva after doing so.

Any write operation you do to it will reduce the possibility of getting anything back.
Even just a quick format.