Hi I have a faulty Laptop, and I have some important data I need to recover off the harddrive. I have purchased a external enclosure to plug into my PC. I have done this and the PC has rocognised the harddrive. However when I go to open it, it says "reformat this drive" when I click no it doesn't do anything and when I click yes it says "all data will be errased".

How can I enter the drive to retrieve my files before reformatting?

My harddrive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 and I am using a Iomak 2.5 inch sata Hard Drive Enclosure.

Thanks Steve

Try with any Data Recovery software u can find free software in this site try with that.

Assuming it's an NTFS drive, I used NTFS Recovery by Diskinternals. It's $99 but worth every penny. I used it to recover and over-chkdsk/r-ed hard disk and recovered all the data off it, including the OS and deleted files. In my case, it ran for about 22 hours (in an external USB case) on a Quad-core Xeon, 16Gb machine. It didn't seem to wanna do much after 12 hours on a 3.6, 4Gb EM64T machine. Not saying it wouldn't work but seems like the additional horsepower got the job done. Check it out:

http://www.diskinternals.com/ntfs-recovery/

Almost as invaluable as MHDD

I have tried to looking for a program, (Pandora Recovery), and it keeps "not responding" whenever I go near it? Any program in particular I should be trying to use? Or is there another way to access the data on the harddrive?

Honestly, you may be sending this drive on it's death roll. These 5400.3 are notorious for basically committing suicide.

Is the firmware version 3.CAE or 7.01?



If so I would advise a professional, if the data is valuable. PCImage is close by you.




Try a trial version of R-Studio and see if it will see anything, but again it's risky with this drive as it may have suffered a head crash, etc.