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I was going through my storage when I found an older WD6401AALS hard drive I was using years ago. I popped it in a SATA dock and Windows 10 wouldn't recognize it, disk management said the drive was "dynamic invalid", and it won't let me access it. Most of the software that said it could recover the data from the drive was pay-only, and those that had trials didn't even know where to start.
I found this page, which explains how to use an open source program called 'Testdisk' to examine the data and see if it can recover the files... but it said the FAT was damaged, and while it detected a partition (named [GAMES]), it said the files could not be recovered.
Do you think it's still possible to recover the files somehow? If not, it's no biggie - I just wanted to verify the drive was still good so I could give it to a friend so he could use it, but if the data got corrupted somehow, while the drive was in storage and unused... I might as well toss it.
Thank you!
Edit: Well it turns out the drive DOES work... so the problem is that Windows 10 refused to recognize the drive. I read that drives with this problem could still be read in Ubuntu, so I ran my Ubuntu VirtualBox VM, hooked up my USB dock to it... and the system was incapable of mounting the drive, but, it did recognize it had three partitions - one 100 GB, one 450 GB, and something that looked like space I couldn't reclaim. So it got me thinking... is this a Windows XP boot drive?
I shut down the VM, and started up my Windows XP VM. Windows XP saw the drive but wouldn't let me do anything, so I went to disk management, and it saw it as a "foreign" drive, which I then reclaimed. And after a few minutes, it worked and let me see the data on it. It was an ancient Windows XP install and my old Steam drive! So it turned out to be an unholy combination of the drive having two partitions on it, one of them being the XP install, plus being a Dynamic drive, PLUS administrative / permission / ownership fuckery on it.
I'm not deleting this post, hopefully Google will pick it up and show this in search results in the future. Anyway sorry to bother you guys.
I found this page, which explains how to use an open source program called 'Testdisk' to examine the data and see if it can recover the files... but it said the FAT was damaged, and while it detected a partition (named [GAMES]), it said the files could not be recovered.
Thank you!
Edit: Well it turns out the drive DOES work... so the problem is that Windows 10 refused to recognize the drive. I read that drives with this problem could still be read in Ubuntu, so I ran my Ubuntu VirtualBox VM, hooked up my USB dock to it... and the system was incapable of mounting the drive, but, it did recognize it had three partitions - one 100 GB, one 450 GB, and something that looked like space I couldn't reclaim. So it got me thinking... is this a Windows XP boot drive?
I shut down the VM, and started up my Windows XP VM. Windows XP saw the drive but wouldn't let me do anything, so I went to disk management, and it saw it as a "foreign" drive, which I then reclaimed. And after a few minutes, it worked and let me see the data on it. It was an ancient Windows XP install and my old Steam drive! So it turned out to be an unholy combination of the drive having two partitions on it, one of them being the XP install, plus being a Dynamic drive, PLUS administrative / permission / ownership fuckery on it.
I'm not deleting this post, hopefully Google will pick it up and show this in search results in the future. Anyway sorry to bother you guys.
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