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Taking a laptop's SSD and making it an external drive (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 month ago by theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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Recently my laptop died. Thankfully, the issue wasn't the SSD. So I bought an external enclosure, took the SSD out of the laptop, and popped it into the external enclosure. I was hoping at that point, it would "just work".

I was hoping that when I plug it into my steam deck in desktop mode, it would recognise it and I could get some files off of it. Well, just one file really, my Sims 4 save. But it isn't recognised at all.

Is there anything I can do to get the save file off of the SSD? I can borrow someone else's (windows) laptop if necessary, though it didn't recognise it last time I plugged it in there either.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

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[–] theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't know if it was encrypted. I don't think I set it to be, does windows do it automatically?

Do you have the recovery key for your drive?

Where would I find that? It's the drive that came with the laptop

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

If you're not familiar with how you can identify those partitions, this may be helpful: https://www.kali.org/tools/dislocker/

[–] zaph@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

does windows do it automatically?

According to documentation, no. In practice, I've seen it happen multiple times.

Where would I find that?

If you didn't get screwed by Microsoft it would be in your Microsoft account. Go to office.com and log in.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have also seen it heavily pushed to the user, and sometimes people just agree to it without knowing they did.

[–] zaph@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Yes but in those cases, which it sounds like includes op, you should have it in your Microsoft account. I had a customer bring in a new PC they'd just purchased from Walmart that had a home license and already had bitlocker enabled. If I didn't catch it they could have lost any data saved to it from a botched update in the future.

[–] theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ok, there's an entry in my Microsoft account for bitlocker for my laptop, and I can see the recovery key. How do I use it to decrypt the drive though?

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The neighboring comment by just_another_person links to a tool that can be used to read bitlocker drives. It might be easier to just find another windows device to do the job tho. If losing the files on the drive would be catastrophic, then fucking around with lots of terminal stuff that you dont understand might not be the best.

Also, if you dont wanna install gparted you can still check the list of connected drives by running lsblk -f in a terminal.

[–] theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It might be easier to just find another windows device to do the job tho

Yeah, I think that's what I'll need to do. I found a guide here detailing how to decrypt a bitlocker encrypted drive, I'll give that a go when I'm able to borrow a windows machine

Also, if you dont wanna install gparted

I want to, but the steam deck isn't having it. It's arch based, so need to use pacman, but that just gives an error when I try

[–] zaph@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

 #pacman -S gparted gpart nilfs-utils jfsutils ntfsprogs reiserfsprogs xfsprogs

[–] theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

Thanks, I'll try that!

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

Ah yeah i have no clue about arch stuff. Good luck getting your data!

[–] zaph@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Thunar just prompts me for a password when a plug a bitlocker encrypted disk on mine if it's not prompting you and you can't install a file manager that will you'll need a pc. You'll probably need a pc anyway because unless you have access to windows you can't actually decrypt the drive and will have to copy data off of it, reformat, and restore the data you need.