Data Recovery from NTFS drive

Earlier in the week I took up a challenge to help a workmate to recover some photos of his grandmother from his sick Dell notebook. His grandmother passed away recently so these photos were that much more precious; there are no other copies of the photos either.

Workmate's Dell notebook (Latitude CPx H450GT)

• floppy drive
• no optical drive
• no network card
• a single USB 1.0 port (no option to boot in BIOS)

My LG notebook (LS50-CSVA)

• optical drive
• USB 2.0 ports (bootable)
• no floppy drive

The Dell notebook does not load into Windows. It quickly flashes an error and restarts automatically. The same happened when attempting to load into Safe Mode.

The Dell hard drive is NTFS formatted and has Partition Magic installed.

My first attempt involved removing the hard-drive from the Dell and inserting this into my external USB hard-drive enclosure. While Windows (on the LG) detected the hard-drive, it could not access the contents.

Returned the hard drive back into the Dell. Created an MS-DOS bootdisk and included NTFS Reader for DOS. The NTFS Reader utility permitted me to access the files on the hard-drive, so that was a step in the right direction. However, the floppy disk did not have sufficient free space to save the photos onto.

The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool allowed me to make my 1GB (Transcend JetFlash 150) flash drive bootable. I also included NTFS Reader utility since this application was the only utility that could access the contents on the Dell hard drive.

Because Dell is not able to boot from USB, I popped the Dell hard-drive into the LG notebook, updated the BIOS to boot from USB, ran the NTFS Reader utility and was able to copy the photos from the Dell hard-drive onto the USB flash drive.

My workmate was absolutely ecstatic the photos were recovered as he had already resigned they were lost for good.

As a bonus, I also cured his sick Dell notebook: erased the hard-drive contents and reinstalled Windows XP.