is it possible to connect this internal 3.5" to my laptop? I have a USB to SATA connector with power source - but when I go into disk managment the drive shows, but isn’t able to be connected to.
Any ideas?
Is the drive new? If so, you’ll need to create the partition, then format it.
If not, what formatting does it have now? Does disk Management show any “healthy” partitions? If so, right mouse click on the healthy partition and select “Change Drive Letter”, then “Change”, then “Assign the following drive letter” then pick one that’s unused.
If used and you don’t need any existing partitions, you can delete them (right mouse click, Delete Volume), then partition, then format.
it has a lot of data on it, it used to be in a NAS. DIsk Management shows no partitions.
That’s a pretty important detail to have left out. Do you need to recovery the data?
What NAS device did it come from?
Was it a part of a RAID array? If so, do you know what raid level? Where are the other drives?
If you don’t know or don’t have the other drives, it’s unlikely you can recover the data.
If you’re not trying to recover the data, just partition and format it.
It was from a DNS-320 - mirrored to another drive.
That’s a D’Link unit? You might try a DLink specific forum.
You may be able to recover using any Linux disk recovery software. However, the free versions may not recover things like folder structure and may limit how much you can recover unless you purchase a license.
You can also try this package, which is specific to the DLinks.
You can scan the drive to determine if the data is recoverable, Scanning is free, recovery requires a license.
thank you for that. When the drives are plugged into the NAS I can view the files - BUT it was infected by Malware, and a lot of the files have been infected and are useless. But, I would like to run a disk recovery software on it to see if some previous versions of some of the files are still available. I hoped I could just connect it to my laptop, but as we have already discussed it doesn’t seem possible to even see the drive.
I can’t say for sure about the Dlink NAS’s but they are typically formatted in EXT3/4 or such. Windows will not recognize the drive.
If you want, you can try R-Linux. It’s free.
It might have some issues reading the raid configuration (they have a paid version that will) but may allow recovery of files. Have it scan the drive and see what comes up.
I keep a Linux live USB stick when I need to use unorthodox media. USB sticks with exFAT are widely legible so using a second one for data recovery is easy, 1TB USB sticks are widely available now.
