Toshiba MQ04ABF100 Hard Drive Issue
brucine Posted messages 24445 Registration date Status Membre Last intervention -
Hello everyone, I’m reaching out to you regarding a small problem. I recently acquired an internal hard drive that I am now using externally with a 2.5-inch enclosure. When I connect it via USB to my laptop, the file explorer recognizes my hard drive, but when I open the folder, I can only access a tiny part of my files. A few PDF, JPEG, DOCX, or MP3 files appear, but I don’t have the entire folder from my old local system. My old laptop had Windows 10, and my new one has Windows 11. Naturally, I haven’t formatted it yet. The hard drive appears correctly in disk management, with no unallocated partitions, just a single unique partition in NTFS. I’ve run several command prompts in admin mode, including CHKDSK, but without success. I used CrystalDiskInfo to obtain information about the drive, which is in good shape. I tried to recover the files with Recuva, TestDisk, and EaseUS, but with no success. I’ve only found old files that were deleted a long time ago, so restoring them would be of no use to me. I’ve tried many things over the past three days, but I’m out of ideas and still don’t understand what’s going on. Can someone help me out? Thanks :)
1 réponse
Hello
If your drive has already been used as a system disk, you may have some "old" folders in it such as: Windows, Users, Program Files, etc...
Documents are generally stored in a subfolder Users that has a name (the one used before...) or even several different ones. You will need to try them all.
You need to "open" this folder in the file explorer to find your old folders/documents (My Documents, My Videos, My Pictures, etc...).
Opening the user folder can be slow/very slow (assigning your current Windows 11 rights to the folders from the old Windows 10...) and you have to do it again if you close the folder...
Sometimes, they remain inaccessible if you do not have "Administrator" rights on your Windows 11 or if you changed the user when it was Windows 10!!
If it opens properly, try to "drag" these user folders (My Documents, My Videos, My Pictures, etc...) to the root of the external drive so you won't have to do the operation again.
See you later
Hello,
It is assumed that the problem has been resolved or abandoned for over a month now.
There is no reason for us to have an external data drive that is system-related, and it is indeed the NTFS permissions that are blocking this, but all it takes is to take ownership of the entire drive once and for all by right-clicking, properties, security or using the DOS syntax TAKEOWN or ICACLS.
Then, you need to back up the data you want to recover either on the PC or on that drive itself in a new partition that you create according to the available space, then depending on the case, format the entire drive or its system partition to turn it into a data drive.