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What do you like for salvaging old laptop hard drives?

H

hunterjwizzard

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I've got this somewhat rare Fujitsu windows 2000 tablet I want to restore. It still posts ok but I can't get it to boot. I think the hard drive no longer runs well enough to actually boot the operating system, but it might still be readable. From what I hear the software required to make these things pen-friendly is completely impossible to find, so I pretty much have to pull a good hard disk image from it if I ever want the machine to live again.

Now, I have all manner of SOFTWARE tools at my disposal to do this, that is not a problem.

Where I'm stuck is finding something quality to hook the drive up to a modern computer to pull the image. Its a laptop hard drive, and all I've ever had for those were woefully cheap laptop IDE to regular IDE adapters. Is there something better?
 
Just to make an image of the hard disk, I usually just use a Linux live CD and the "dd" command.

It gets hairy if there are bad sectors on the hard drive. Here are my notes about that:

Make a block image, skipping bad sectors, but filling the target file bad sectors with "0" dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512 conv=noerror,sync iflag=direct iflag=direct for reading oflag=direct for writitng - prevents barfing when wiping a drive with errors. To repair a drive with "bad" sectors dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sda bs=512 conv=noerror,sync oflag=direct Using a larger block size will make it go much, much faster. To wipe a drive with "bad" sectors, forcing sectors to remap: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=262144 conv=noerror,sync oflag=direct If oflag=direct is not specified, the Linux kernel cache may attempt to READ ahead while writing, causing a "write" failure where there should be none.

Then for analyzing and retrieving stuff, it kinds of depends on the hard disk format. For FAT WinImage works well to extract or even insert files. NTFS is probably easier to manipulate by mounting the image in a VM or mounting the hard drive on a real computer with either Windows or Linux.

I've never had any real problems with those laptop IDE to desktop IDE adapters. They are just pass through componts. Not like the dangerously defective corrupting garbage that was sold on shelves as IDE<->SATA adapters.
 
I think you missed the point where I said "I have plenty of software to do this". It is specifically the hardware-aspect of it that is a problem. And no, I cannot boot off of a linux live CD. In fact I have no way to boot this tablet from anything but an internal hard drive.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Have you considered an inexpensive USB-to-IDE adapter? Many have the correct 44 pin 2mm connector.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/143712382217 Of course, if your hard drive is bricked, that isn't going to save it. Many "modern" PCs no longer have PATA/IDE connectors.
Click to expand...
I've got one or two of those floating around. My experience is they're not great, then again I don't thing I've ever tried one on a laptop drive. I've got some spares I can test with.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I've got one or two of those floating around. My experience is they're not great, then again I don't thing I've ever tried one on a laptop drive. I've got some spares I can test with.
Click to expand...

My experience with those things is they do a perfectly good job. Granted I bought mine well over a decade ago as part of a kit that included the necessary power supply for 3.5" drives, maybe the quality has gone down a bit to get them sellable for $4.71, but, yeah, no complaints. I've even used it to access CF cards by plugging an IDE->CF sled into it, which is *kind* of a useful test to make sure that the CF card works properly in "true IDE" mode. (I don't think the normal multi-flash readers use that on their CF slot.)
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Now, I have all manner of SOFTWARE tools at my disposal to do this, that is not a problem.

Where I'm stuck is finding something quality to hook the drive up to a modern computer to pull the image.
Click to expand...

Buy a forensic USB recovery device if you want something "quality"
Otherwise, a Linux box with ddrescue covers most of what you need for LBA IDE recovery.
a modern computer
Click to expand...
Isn't even descriptive enough to comment on.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
My experience with those things is they do a perfectly good job. Granted I bought mine well over a decade ago as part of a kit that included the necessary power supply for 3.5" drives, maybe the quality has gone down a bit to get them sellable for $4.71, but, yeah, no complaints. I've even used it to access CF cards by plugging an IDE->CF sled into it, which is *kind* of a useful test to make sure that the CF card works properly in "true IDE" mode. (I don't think the normal multi-flash readers use that on their CF slot.)
Click to expand...

I also bought mine over a decade ago as part of a kit, though the power supply never worked particularly well. I've since found you can use a PSU tester to fire up a spare ATX power supply. Though I haven't tried that with the USB adapter.

Al Kossow said:
Buy a forensic USB recovery device if you want something "quality"
Click to expand...

I've not heard of these before, can you be more specific?
 
Laptop IDE is just IDE with two extra pins for power, so if drive is "almost"
good any cheap adapter like this (the first I found!) will do the job.


On software side I think you couldn't find a better free softare like this
for problematic drives.

HDDSuperClone - HDDSuperClone

HDDSuperClone - An advanced Linux based hard drive cloning/imaging tool Up until now, gnu ddrescue has been widely known to be the best free hard drive cloning tool for failing hard drives. It is open source and cross platform. But being cross platform has some limitations, as there are some
www.hddsuperclone.com www.hddsuperclone.com

What brand/model is the drive?
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Where I'm stuck is finding something quality to hook the drive up to a modern computer to pull the image. Its a laptop hard drive, and all I've ever had for those were woefully cheap laptop IDE to regular IDE adapters. Is there something better?
Click to expand...
I don't think there is much difference in the hardware, provided it works.

(On the software side, I would mention the freeware tool ddrescue, which can skip over anything bad and still read good blocks after encountering bad ones; very handy if you come up against such a situation.)
 
noppa said:
Laptop IDE is just IDE with two extra pins for power, so if drive is "almost"
good any cheap adapter like this (the first I found!) will do the job.
Click to expand...
You're assuming that his "modern" PC has IDE. Many modern ones don't. Hell, it's getting hard to find one with plain old PCI. USB should be good for any "modern" PC.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I've got one or two of those floating around. My experience is they're not great, then again I don't thing I've ever tried one on a laptop drive. I've got some spares I can test with.
Click to expand...
The one I’ve got is also a decade old but its IDE connections have never failed to work for me. Mine’s a 3 in 1 SATA/Desktop IDE/Laptop IDE. The SATA part of it has gotten flakey recently but it’s old and in rough shape. Model of mine is an Apricorn DriveWire.
 
I did a test run with a drive from another laptop, it worked flawlessly and I was able to get a good clean image. I believe the drive in my tablet is in similar shape, on its last legs but mechanically still functional. I'm going to try and image it tomorrow.
 
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