HP Envy NoteBook 1TB Hard Drive Removed But Cant Find C Drive on it ?

[fonetonez]

We had to remove a 1TB drive from this notebook and put it onto a USB Dock station to grab the data on another PC

Data F: Comes up and Recovery E: comes up

Data F: is packed with data which we are happy to regain back

Recovery E: Shows as Healthy OEM Partition in disk management and 11GB but when you open up all you get is to shortcut links to E: drive and a recovery folder with nothing in it ?

I need to find the C: Drive where all my recent documents were

Pretty lost here as it seems so simple and then again not, as surely it should show like the other drives ?

Any help please

Thank you

[WAWood]

@fonetonez 

You're connecting the old drive to a different PC, right?  In that case, you are NOT going to be able to recover documents from the old drive to the new PC because Windows will not allow you to access those folders if they are in the users section.  Even if your login name is the same on both PCs, that is not the name that the OS uses and it will see different users -- and lock you out of the old users folders.

[fonetonez]

Yes a different PC via a USB docking station

How can we get these files off the drive then ?

The old laptop is not going to work again

Thank you

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@fonetonez 

You need to do the following:
1) Download and install this utility on a working PC http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
2) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tool does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the demo version is free https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

[kenysc]

Just another way if you don't want to go the software way:

If you can plug back the HDD to your old notebook, you can copy the C:'s data to "F:" (which can be another drive letter e.g. "D:" in your notebook), just make sure you copied the data to an un-encrypted folder.

Cheers,

[fonetonez]

But the notebook dont power up 

This is why we removed it

How can i do this ?

[kenysc]

Then you need a software solution like WAWood's.