How to move good HDD from dead laptop OR transfer files

[HagelBagel]

Hey all, 

 

I've agreed to help a friend of mine after she walked across shag carpet in socks and shocked her computer to death. (If only she were wearing an iFixit ESD strap.) I plugged her old drive into my laptop via a usb - 2.5" hdd adapter and found that her drive is detected, spins, and appears to have all the data intact.

She wants at least her school files back but wouldn't mind a clone of her old computer, so my options are either to replace her new laptop's drive with her old one or use some sort of software to either clone her old drive to her new device or recover her files off of it. I tried pulling files off of her old drive just having it plugged in but was unsuccessful, as I was told by Windows that I did not have permission to access her drive's files. 

 

What would be the best way to accomplish this; Hardware replacement or Software transfer/clone? Could I just slap her old drive into the new computer and start it up good as new? (I really doubt it would be that easy)

 

Thanks for your advice!

[Electronics Wizardy]

If its a older laptop, you really want a resintall, so id make a image, remove files from image, then put that on th enew pc.

[mariushm]

You can make a disk image of the drive using various cloning software... user could then mount the disk image and extract the files from that disk image.

 

About the permissions thing ... it's simply about the windows user account, and your user not having the rights to view the files. You can fix that by adding your account as one that has full rights to view those files.

Here's video that shows how to fix it ... once you add your users to that drive's file system you can access the files and if you want you can copy files over or make a zip file of some folders, whatever you want.

 

 

[HagelBagel]

On 2/14/2020 at 2:51 AM, mariushm said:

You can make a disk image of the drive using various cloning software... user could then mount the disk image and extract the files from that disk image.

 

About the permissions thing ... it's simply about the windows user account, and your user not having the rights to view the files. You can fix that by adding your account as one that has full rights to view those files.

Here's video that shows how to fix it ... once you add your users to that drive's file system you can access the files and if you want you can copy files over or make a zip file of some folders, whatever you want.

 

 

Thanks, I'll give it a shot!

[HagelBagel]

On 2/14/2020 at 2:28 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

If its a older laptop, you really want a resintall, so id make a image, remove files from image, then put that on th enew pc.

Sounds like a plan. Thanks!