Hidden sections on a friend's hard drive Mysterious files on shared storage
Hidden sections on a friend's hard drive Mysterious files on shared storage
Hello, you received a dead laptop from a friend and they wanted to recover its data since there was no backup. It’s a 2.5-inch HDD from an Acer Windows laptop. When connected to your Sabrent SATA-USB adapter, Windows10 doesn’t automatically assign a location for the drive. Using DiskPart it displays 15 unknown partitions with varying sizes. Disk Management also shows several small partitions. (screenshots included) CrystaldiskInfo reports 13 PowerOnCount entries with zero PowerOnHours, which seems incorrect given the laptop’s age and usage. I haven’t seen a disk in this condition before. Anyone know what’s happening? Am I in trouble?
I thought that too. It seems they lack the expertise to handle this. They say the PC failed and ran Windows normally before, but now everything is locked down. I can't manually change drive letters. Disk settings are hidden, and I can't even pick up the partitions in the disk manager.
Which partitions hold personal important data? A simple relocation to an external drive would be enough; in case things go wrong, just merge or reformat the entire disk. Regarding the partitions themselves, the only possibilities are that the system is creating random restore points—possibly a large number of them—or it might be reorganizing files in a more structured way. It’s probably best to start fresh and clean the drive if possible.
I don’t understand anything. The volumes aren’t visible. When I asked about partitions, they didn’t know what one is. Restore points might be relevant. Regarding a drive deleting software, he’s very cautious about security tools—he might have found something meant to clean his drive but ended up erasing everything in unusable sections.
Start from a running copy of Ubuntu 22 using a USB drive. You should be able to access additional details about the available partitions.