Retrieving data from external hard drive via motherboard SATA

[Aereldor]

Greetings.

A friend of mine has damaged the USB port on his external hard drive. Data retrieval services over here charge a rather exorbitant fee, and there don't appear to be any trustworthy replacement enclosures around.

Do you know if it'll be safe to take it out of its enclosure and connect it to my motherboard via SATA power and data cables to retrieve data from the drive? Will it just show up as another drive on Windows explorer, or is it more complicated than that?

Thanks,
Aereldor.

[iamdarkyoshi]

it should work fine.

[Kobathor]

If it's in a SATA to USB enclosure, you can just take it out and use regular SATA and SATA power. It'll probably run faster if it's a USB 2.0 adapter, too.

[michrech]

Well, I don't know about Samsung, but that isn't true about all Toshiba drives.  In fact, I took a 3TB 3.5" drive my stepfather has out of its enclosure and put it into a 3.5" hot-swap bay.  The only issue I had there was that the USB<->SATA controller did something with the drive to allow it to work with older systems, so I had to move all the data off of it, then install it into the hot-swap bay, wipe the partitions, format, then move the data back.

 

Not always. Toshiba and Samsung comes with a solded circuit board between the sata conectors and usb port of the hdd. That makes the recovery process a nightmare

[michrech]

Depends on the drive.  What I do, before I decide to take an external drive apart, is look it up on Youtube.  Pretty much any drive that exists has a video on Youtube of someone tearing it apart.  

 

Greetings.

A friend of mine has damaged the USB port on his external hard drive. Data retrieval services over here charge a rather exorbitant fee, and there don't appear to be any trustworthy replacement enclosures around.

Do you know if it'll be safe to take it out of its enclosure and connect it to my motherboard via SATA power and data cables to retrieve data from the drive? Will it just show up as another drive on Windows explorer, or is it more complicated than that?

Thanks,
Aereldor.

[techguru]

Greetings.

A friend of mine has damaged the USB port on his external hard drive. Data retrieval services over here charge a rather exorbitant fee, and there don't appear to be any trustworthy replacement enclosures around.

Do you know if it'll be safe to take it out of its enclosure and connect it to my motherboard via SATA power and data cables to retrieve data from the drive? Will it just show up as another drive on Windows explorer, or is it more complicated than that?

Thanks,

Aereldor.

take the drive outta the case first

then we can tell you more

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there Aereldor,

 

What's the drive's brand and model. What the guys explained is true - some drives do come with a soldered USB connector and you can't really connect them to the motherboard. Others come as regular 2.5" drives and should work fine. Do have in mind that some drives do come with hardware encryption features and this makes impossible reading the drive outside of its own enclosure. This is why it's important to see what exact drive do you have and see all of its features.

 

Captain_WD.

[Aereldor]

He hasn't sent me the details of the drive yet, just its condition. I'll remember to ask him when I see him next.

Thanks for the help, everyone. I'll be sure to contact you once I have further information.