Using Apple system to recover data files from a laptop drive that was NTFS and now RAW
by Mountain Computers Inc, Publication Date: Saturday, February 11, 2023
View Count: 211, Keywords: Apple, Macintosh, NTFS Format, Raw Format, Data Recovery, Hashtags: #Apple #Macintosh #NTFSFormat #RawFormat #DataRecovery
A few days ago, a client named Chris brought in a laptop where the system was going very slow. He said his fiance barely used it, and it was not that old. Upon inspection, yes, the drive was slow yet without digging deeper, the drive was scanned and repaired, nothing weird to report, yet it was very slow.
So, after an hour of tuning the system and cleaning up the file system, the reboots kept getting longer and longer, and freezing at restarting, and freezing at boot, and all the Windows updates were completed.
Hmmmm.. So I checked the serial number against the warranty database and the system was a 2017 era system. Okay, 5 years on the drive was at its peak lifetime yet what kind of drive was it. At this point the system stopped booting and kept freezing.
Uh-oh! Time to pull the drive and voila! It was one of those vintage Seagate 1TB Mobile HDD that I had seen so many times before that eventually just could not handle the Windows operating system for daily usage.
Therefore, I went to mount the drive on a drive dock on my Windows 11 recovery lab system and nada. Disk Management showed the drive and partitions yet no format. So, I applied the next available drive letter. Well, that worked for a moment and then the system and drive froze. Uh-oh! Try an older drive dock. Sometimes newer drive docks don't compensate for older drives. Still nothing. Just flashing light on the drive dock.
Well, at this point, I knew his fiance's data was needed and there was no time.
Apple mac mini to the rescue. I pulled that off the shelf, booted it up, and added the legacy drive dock and attached the laptop drive and voila, it mounted, and it showed me the Windows partition and I immediately pulled his fiance's files off the drive, ~21GB of stuff, and then I looked for other things of importance usually left hanging around in the Public folder, AppData folder, etc. and nothing. Not even browser favorites and password key db files.
Great! Mission accomplished.
Apple Mac mini to the rescue and success once again. Yes, a 2014 edition that is running Big Sur. It works!!
Oh yeah, put in a 500GB Crucial SSD in Chris' fiance laptop, reloaded the OS quickly and restored the fiance's files to a desktop folder and called it good. They can sift through the files and restore whatever they need to the proper place. Normally, I would have done it, yet the was a side note Chris had mentioned as to just keep the restored files on the Desktop in a folder named after his fiance. Done! Did it. Success!
Another Happy Customer!
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