How to get access to a laptop hard drive data

Generally, there are three reasons why you can’t access your laptop data: logical problem, laptop issue and hard drive failure. In practice, if your laptop doesn’t work, for example, it doesn’t start at all or Windows freezes when attempting to access the drive — it is difficult to detect why it happens. Nevertheless, whatever the cause of laptop failure is, the solution is to get the hard drive connected to a working operating system — be it a desktop PC or a bootable CD.

Let’s consider the first option — logical problem. You need to disassemble the laptop, extract the hard drive and connect it to a desktop PC. You should do the same if you have accidentally deleted some files because even restarted Windows writes something to the disk and reduces the chance of recovery.

To pull the disk out you’d better search for the video how to extract the hard drive from your particular laptop on YouTube. You need to connect the disk to a desktop PC. For example, you can use a USB-to-SATA adapter. Connect the cable to the disk and then connect it to the PC.

Then, go to My Computer and look for your disk there. Double-click on it and check the data. If data looks OK, save it to a safe location. If there is no disk in My Computer you should check Disk Management. To do this press WinKey together with R, enter in the search field diskmgmt.msc and then press Enter. Look for the disk. If you see it’s listed there and its filesystem is RAW, you should use ReclaiMe File Recovery to extract data.

But if there is no disk in My Computer and the Disk Management, most likely, you deal with a mechanically damaged disk or with damaged USB-to-SATA adapter. You should try to connect your laptop drive to a PC directly via SATA port because SATA handles defective drives better than USB. First, you need to place your computer where it will be located throughout the recovery process that may take about two or three hours. Don’t forget about electrostatic discharge. The best protection measure is to use a special anti-static wrist strap, but typically people do not have such a thing at home. So, just touch a metal cover of computer while it is plugged into the socket.

Cut off the power from the PC. Remove the cover, look for motherboard and find a free port on it. Connect your drive to the motherboard by a SATA cable. Then connect power to the disk: find a free cable from power supply and connect it to the disk. Check once again that all cables are connected well and connect power, then press power button.

Enter the system, open My Computer and find a disk there. Open it and check data. If data looks good, immediately save the data to a safe location. If there is no disk in My Computer, check Disk Management. Look for your drive based on its size, or maybe the presents of the recovery partition. If your drive is listed there, create a disk image file. Mechanically damaged drives may get worse because of wear and tear repeated retries. Almost any data recovery software can create disk image file, you can use also ReclaiMe to create it. Further you will recover the data from this disk image file using ReclaiMe File Recovery software.

If after all these manipulations there is still no disk in My Computer and Disk Management, most likely, your drive is not do-it-yourself recoverable. In this case send it to a reputable data recovery lab.