Help finding a data drive on removed hard drive?

[rustyh3]

I have a fried r41. motherboard just did not hold up to a beer spilled into the keyboard......

Story...daughter took son's old laptop to Belgium for semester. Took lots of photos. Loaded them on hard drive. Last night in Belgium at departure party a malt beverage was spilled into keyboard. Brought laptop home and took to repair facility. Motherboard was DOA. Removed hard drive and mounted into mobile disk caddy. We cannot find her photos. I believe that computer was originally set up to have a data drive partition. There is some data, not much, but none of the Belgium photos. None of the documents she created during the trip are to be found.

Any ideas how to find? I cannot imagine they are lost. I have average computer skills so be gentle please.

Thanks, Rusty

[mgo]

Removed hard drive and mounted into mobile disk caddy. We cannot find her photos. I believe that computer was originally set up to have a data drive partition. There is some data, not much, but none of the Belgium photos. None of the documents she created during the trip are to be found.

Once data is written to the drive, it will stay there, unless some body inputs a command to delete or move the files.

Did the user have a separate backup drive? In their anxiety after the spill did somebody do a lot of typing on the keyboard which might have included some sort of delete commands?

Since the hard drives on ThinkPads reside right next to the keyboard it is possible liquids got across the drive's contacts, causing data loss. Usually, however, once the platters are written to, the data stays there.

Do you see more than one partition on the drive now that it is externally connected? Were the pictures, etc on a hidden or encrypted folder?

If the date is on the drive, a recovery service would be able to retrieve it, but the cost is very high...hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Just few wild ideas that may help...

[ZaZ]

Thinkpads from the factory don't usually come with data partitions, but rather one IBM_PRELOAD partition. I don't know which app she was using, but the default for storing documuments is usually My Documents under the user name. I'd start looking there. You could search the drive for .jpg files or whatever format they were in, to see if that turns up anything. I doubt the beer did any damage to the drive unless is was dropped though I suppose anything's possible.

[Kyocera]

It may be that the OS is not seeing that drive letter of the "data partition" when your drive is in the enclosure, i.e. if the data partition was "G" or something. You might need to get some software that will show exactly what is on that drive. Or if you have another laptop of the same model stick the drive in there and boot it.

[jdhurst]

There are two more possible do-it-yourself approaches:
1. Boot with a Bart's PE or Knoppix boot CD and see if you can find the partitions and data.
2. Use SpinRite (under $100) to check the drive and recover data. The time I recovered data with SpinRite, it wrote it in FAT format so I had some wrinkles in retrieving it, but it worked.
... JDH