Data recovery from disk of dead Thinkpad

[Davidhs]

My Z60m decided over the new year that life was too much and is completely dead. All I get is a blank screen on power up, although the little indicators confirm power is getting to the machine. No disk light shows; no BIOS messages, nothing.

So, I now have a new T61.

Although I had up to date backups of most data (created on 31 December, just 24 hours before the failure!), I should like to have a go at recovering a few other items from the disk of the dead TP. So I have acquired a cheap no-name 2.5" SATA HDD caddy with USB2 that came with no real documentation.

Before I try to use it, I want to be quite sure that it will not spontaneously write over data on my old disk; I want to be sure it won't try to format it it or anything.

Does anyone have experience of using these little caddies?
Are they safe to use?
Is it likely to be able to read NTFS? And the disk is partitioned; will it cope with that?

Does anyone know a better way to extract the data from the old disk? .... eg. a better, safer caddy?

Any ideas welcome and thanks in hope..

[jdhurst]

It might work (I have not tried specifically what you suggest). Other ways include: (1) Booting with a networkable Knoppix or Bart's PE boot CD which will allow you to access data on Z60 and then copy it over the network to your new TP (all assuming data can be read); and (2) SpinRite - not free, but works and retrieves otherwise unretreivable data. Option 2 is realistic if you think truly important data is on the Z60 disk that is not in your backup.
... JDH

[RealBlackStuff]

From the description I would assume that the hard disk is still perfectly all right.
Just put it in the USB case and plug it into your T61, using the USB Y-splitter, and you should be able to read the 'old' HD, regardless whether FAT32 or NTFS.
If you can not read the 'My Documents' we have a solution for that as well (i.e. take ownership).

[uberT]

I went thru this a couple of weeks ago on my T30. I had serious corruption in a SYSTEM32 file. We ended up using bartPE (bootable CD) and I recovered 100% of my data from the "dead" hard drive. I have a stand-alone USB HD and transferred all my data over to that. It was far simpler than I could have imagined.

I've since re-formatted the dead machine and it's running just fine. I ended up with a new T61 in the interim.

[Davidhs]

Thanks everyone... Thus emboldened, I plugged it in ... and lo and behold, explorer saw all the partitions and within moments i was copying the files.

I didn't know the disk was good, but the nature of the Z60m failure suggested the disk was not involved.

So thanks to forum members for the support enabling me to recover 6GB of photos which I had largely but not entirely copied to my network disk.

And thanks also to Acronis for a successful backup to my network disk of my main critical data just 24 hours before the failure.

[jomar]

I have the same issue, only the old drive is password protected. Any solutions to get to the data?

I've thought of putting it (T42 drive) into my new T61 and deleting the passwords. Would that work - real question is whether the old drive would boot up in the new computer.

Thanks.

[jdhurst]

I have had difficulty using a password protected drive in any but the original machine. I am not saying it can't be done, but I have had three machines with a password-protected drive on the floor. I knew the password. The only machine I could get to delete it was the original machine. ... JDH

[jomar]

Hmm. Maybe I can just change a file share and get to them. I can get in on one password protected user - acts like it never was (had a tech get some data for me - the rest can wait). Thanks.