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Maybe wrong place to ask but...I need help with an old hard drive (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world to c/cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works

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I bought an adapter to retrieve old files from ancient hard drives and I didn't save the stuff from one I had looked at. Now though when I plug it in it will only read as an android file system? It has 2 disk images now, one is labeled Presario D: which shows up as an android backup or something but all folders are empty. The other is Local Disk E: and if I click it it literally just locks up my file explorer to the point I have to restart the PC.

Any thoughts or ideas?

I may have plugged it into an android phone at some point? Not sure though.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You say its a work PC - are you an administrator on this machine? Enterprise machines have often (for over a decade) locked the USB port so corporate data can't be copied off via USB.

I've seen USB drives show up weirdly on such machines.

What do you mean by "like an Android file system"?

Was this drive ever encrypted? That'll make it show up weird too.

The only other thing I can think of is there's something odd with that adapter.

[–] WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No my job just lets me by laptops on the company card there's nothing weird about it it's basically my computer but the company paid for it.

When I plug it in file explorer shows to disk images one of which one opened basically shows what you would see if you plugged in your Android phone to a computer and the other one is called local disk and has all the info on it but freezes the computer when I try to click it.

I know for sure the drive was never encrypted it's from 2013 and short of taking it out of my tower PC even back then and plugging it in a couple of months ago I haven't done anything with it. It worked fine the first time I plugged it in.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

I still don't know what you mean by "What you see when you plug in an Android phone" (I've plugged in a lot of Android phones, and they don't all show up the same way).

I'd take a look at Disk Manager - that will give you some insight.

I suspect the drive has issues. Try a drive recovery tool like Stellar NTFS - but only examine the drive. It should report what partitions it sees and if there's any recoverable data on it.

If you decide to try to recover the data, make sure you save to the drive on your PC. Also that's something that will take hours to days so do it in small batches and keep the drive cool while it's running.