Data Recovery from an old PC

Most of us have had a time when an old PC would not boot, and we needed files off of it. If it is a simple thing such as Windows not working, then you can just boot from a Linux live cd (I recommend Ubuntu) and drag your files to a USB flash drive or to a remote machine. When there is something really wrong (aka. it doesn’t even show the BIOS or the RAM is corrupted) and you cannot boot to the Live CD/USB you still want to recover your files.

Things Needed:

• Another Computer (Linux preferably, but Windows XP or higher, or Mac OS X 10.4 or higher should work)
• USB to SATA/IDE adapter
• Screwdriver

Before you begin: Turn Off and Unplug your computer!!!!!!!!

Step 1: Setting up the Hard Drive

First remove/open your case. I will not show you how to do this, as it varies greatly by case and design. Mine had two buttons on the top and bottom, and you would lie the case on its side, and press them and then you could pull the side of the case up. You should see the inside of your computer, and it should be similar to what is below:

Here is a picture of the hard drive close up:

Now gentely remove the cables without touching the hard drive. It should now look like this:

Now pull the hard drive out. Normally you can just squeeze some of the clasps (the green things on mine) and it will just slide out. After you have done this, plug the power supply  for the USB-SATA/IDE adapter into the wall and then into the Hard Drive. It should start spinning.

Now plug in the adapter. I had to remove one of the side rails to do so, as shown in the below pictures.

I could then plug in the USB-SATA/IDE Adapter:

Now plug the other end into your computer using the usb port and it should pop up as a drive. If it does not try unplugging it then plugging it back in. If it does not you most likely need to use the drivers that came with your adapter.

Step 2: Recovering the Data

Now that you have your hard drive plugged in, the next step is to recover the data from it. This part of the tutorial is based on the fact that you have a UNIX or Unix like system. This includes Linux, BSD and possibly Mac OS. It also assumes that the drive is /dev/sdb within the filesystem. This will vary between OSs and devices. It also assumes that you will be doing data recovery off of the first partition of the old hard drive.

First, unmount the drive, if it was automatically mounted.

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

For the rest of the commands you will need root privileges, as you will be doing byte by byte recovery.

sudo -s

Now that you are in a root shell, create a image file of the drive. This can take several hours on a terabyte drive.

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=bkup.img

After that is done you can either run a program such as photorec or GNU DDRescue to recover data or you can manually extract data by mounting it as read only to prevent accidental data loss:

mkdir bkup_mnt
mount -o loop -r bkup.img bkup_mnt