Did the disk come from a Dell laptop?
If so your sister may have set up a hdd password, which is set independently of the bios password. It will lock the disk contents unless it is sucessfully entered and would result in the disk looking empty to things like GParted.
The only way i have managed to fix this problem is by booting the disk via a Dell laptop, which then give the password prompt on boot and then assuming your sister knows the password, removing the password via the bios.
Might not be your problem though if its not come from a laptop!
Rick On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
I'm trying to recover data from a (Windows 2k) HDD belonging to my sister.
I first tried with the drive in an IDE to USB adapter which wasn't recognised (the adapter was, the disk wasn't) which isn't good. So I'm now trying with the disk mounted in a PC.
The BIOS can see the disk and correctly shows its manufacturer/serial/etc. I booted to an Ubuntu live CD and ran GParted, and it shows the disk as 18GB of unallocated space (which is the right capacity, although obviously I'd have prefered it to show an NTFS partition).
fdisk cannot access the disk. I tried dd which gives a read/write error.
The disk is spinning up OK and isn't noisy.
Any suggestions?
Professional data recovery could be considered but is probably too expensive. It's lost photos of my niece I'm trying to recover, amongst other things. Professional recovery is likely to be too expensive to justify unless it's under <£100 and I tend to assume anyone below that price isn't going to be doing anything I can't do myself with some Linux tools like scalpel, but if anyone knows otherwise I'd love to hear from you!
-- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
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