Data Recovery After A Hard Drive Crash

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I had an 80 Gigabyte laptop hard drive and a laptop-hdd-to-USB adapter. However when I connect it to another computer I can’t access it and it says “Unrecognized USB device”. How can I recover the hard drive and browse through the files? The hard drive has crashed and I’m trying to recover the files, for free preferably

P.S. Also, I would like to recover the drive so it can be used again.

My Response:

Three questions:

1. Does the drive even spin up? If not, then game over.

2. Was the hard drive that died formatted with NTFS?

3. Are you connecting it to a PC running some version of Microsoft Windows?

Security descriptors in NTFS will thwart your attempts to do what you are attempting. That’s part of the security features of using NTFS.

Try this instead. If the drive still spins up, put it back in your laptop. Then go over to Lifehacker and read how to recover files using knoppix. Knoppix is based on a linux kernel and resides completely on a CD.

Create your knoppix CD, put it into your laptop and then boot your laptop from your CD drive. Once the knoppix kernel is live and active, you should be able to mount the problematic drive and copy any salvageable files over to a USB flashdrive for restoration.

See Lifehacker source below.

Lifehacker Geek to Live: Rescue Files with a boot CD