Hi I need serious help ok I made a mistake and overwritten my hard drive when I was upgrading my laptop from windows Vista to windows 7, since then I have taken the hard drive out of the laptop and put it on my Cavalry Duplicate standalone (note the hard drive I took out is a 500GB Toshiba HDD 2J93) my laptop is a Acer 5735 notebook which was running on Vista. Now I have downloaded Stella Data recovery on my Acer Aspire one Netbook which is windows xp and have see and try to recover all my file but the problem is my netbook can not read my external hard drive its having problems, the external hard drive is a 2TB Western Digital My Book 3.0 USB. I tried every thing to get the netbook to read this hard drive but was not successful so now I was thinking of putting my very first hard drive that came with my Acer 5735 notebook back in so I can download the recovery program and recover my files and data that way can someone please tell me if this is possible or not and I wont lose no data or files now I did see all my files and data when I was on Stella I just want to use the windows Vista laptop to recover it to my external hard drive thank you and help help help I hope I explained my problem well ask me anything I will give you more info if you need it.

Do NOT install anything on the drive you want to recover data from.
Most important, it is recommended that you create a clone of the drive you want to recover data from to another healhty drive. This is recommended so that if something happens with thr original then you have another copy to work with.

Then you need to decide how you will scan your drive based on your resources.
There are few options:
1) if want to use Stellar, since it is win based, then that needs to run on a system that you can connect anlther drive (external, which you seem to have problems doing so already, or else)
2) use a dos based tool running from a boot CD or boot flash drive to scan the drive

*when cloning ensure the source drive is not mixed with destination drive, or you will lose the data completely

As always, DIY is prone to mistakes due to inexperience, so be careful or you will lose all your data.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I see labtech has also replied while i was typing

Hi,

Firstly welcome to the forum

Secondly any over written sectors means that the original data stored there before it was over written is gone for good.

It seems to me that you are looking for a free way to try & recover your data as you mentioned Stella showed you your files?
If data recovery software works then the cost to buy it is worth it but that depends of what price you put on your files, photo's etc.
Just remember that DIY comes with risks.

Basic procedure is:

Is the drive physically healthy? If yes then do a sector by sector image of the drive to a file on another drive that you know is in good working order.
Then use the recovery software like Stella or R-Studio on the image file & recover what data you can. If you do something wrong or corrupt your image then at least you still have the original drive as a go back which you can then reimage again.

As i said before that diy has risks. If you feel that it's beyond your abilities then seek a pro.
The wises person knows their limitations

All the best

Loki

Thanks Guys and I understand the risk, I did clone the drive already too but what I really want to do is use my vista laptop with a different hard drive can I do this NOTE the vista laptop is the one I had the overwritten hard drive in I took it out already but I want to put another one in to used it to recover my data and files from the overwritten drive my worry is is there any information on the laptop itself that the recovery drive will need and will I mess it up if I used that Laptop? I really hope not.

No, it's safe.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

thanks I'm going to use it and once I'm done I will post how it all went u guys are very smart with this stuff I'm glad I came here with my questions