A friends laptop greeted her with a "no bootable device" message some time ago and i spent several hours trying to find out if and how i could recover the contents of the hard drive.
She had a pre-installed Windows 8 on it.

I put the drive into an usb3 enclosure. Windows prompts me to format two partitions when i connect it.
In the manage console of windows the hard drive shows up randomly but vanishes again, i have captured a screenshot when it was available.
It shows several recovery partitions and two main data partitions (301,96GB, 150,00GB) without file system.


My first attempt was recuva, did not recognize anything.
Second attempt was Testdisk, it shows "Partition: Read error" and does not find a partition on the drive via search/deep search.
I tried "Recover My Files v5" next, no luck. I used its forensic imager tool to create an Encase image of the drive. Using FTK Imager to view the file shows the same partitions as windows does (attached screenshot) but also does show "unrecognized file system".


I have no clue how i could proceed - any hints?

After checking some other posts i have downloaded DMDE and tried the ntfs search, but it did not find anything.

When I got the same issue
I am formated that and recovers with recuva ,,,
At my end it works and got the files ,, but without folder wise

I am hesistant to do any write operations on the drive, especially as i don't know much about the Encase image and if it provides me with a working copy in case something goes wrong.

try ubuntu live cd

Can you hear any weird sounds in the drive, spins down etc? could you take a picture of the drive and post it?

Good idea.
It does not sound like a totaled hdd i once had, but there is a small clacking sound that repeats itself every 3 seconds which kind of sounds off.
I have added a recording as an attachment, maybe somebody with more experience can listen to it and say more?

In my opinion it might be bad sectors, i can't hear anything strange.

good start would be to image/clone the hard drive to another disk and work on it. make sure you friend haven't use any kind of encryption on it ...

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RAID/Server Recovery

what software would you suggest for that? My data drive has plenty of space, but the imaging software i tried needed working partitions/drive letters.
I do not have a second 500gb drive at hand to clone it 1:1

(without hardware) your best bet will be ddrescue, or dd_rhelp, i think

try ubuntu live cd

well 1:1 clone is the best and safe approach, your friend need either way new disk for his/her laptop buy new one and do a sector to sector clone.

best chances if you or your friend haven't messed up the filesystem, putting back clone drive in laptop may give you the original Operating system as well.

good luck.

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RAID/Server Recovery

Try R-Undelete. It's not free, but its demo mode allows the users to do everything except saving recovered files. You may estimate your chances for successful file recovery, and buy the program only when you believe that recovery will be successful. This is an article explaining how to work with R-Undelete in your case: R-Undelete: File recovery from a non-functional computer.
Some additional advice:
* Try to connect the disk through a SATA (ESATA) rather than a USB adapter.
* Pay attention to the disk SMART data. If it's green, you may work directly with the disk. If it's yellow, better image the disk. R-Undelete can do that even in its demo mode. If the SMART data is red, the best thing is to go to a data recovery pro. You may image such a disk, but with full understanding that the disk may die instantly.
And good luck in the data recovery.

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R-Studio Data Recovery Software