/ Icy Box Data Recovery

Icy Box Data Recovery

I had a Toshiba laptop that crashed, so I bought a Sony Vaio … but I still need to recover all the files that were on the hard drive in the Toshiba. I was going to take it to a data recovery company but was told that by using an Icy Box I could recover the data myself and make use of the spare hard drive; so I bought one. I connected my hard drive to the Icy Box and then to my laptop. Messages came up identifying the new hardware and stating that it is ready to use. I clicked the Computer tab and saw that there was in fact no new drive. I tried using the Icy Box and old hard drive in a PC that runs on XP and the same problem occurred there. I also restarted both the laptop and the PC and the old hard drive was still not usable.

Kat Delong I’ve edited your question, but you had a lot of good information in there. Even though you say you don’t know much about computers, you are definitely on the right track. You’re right, you DON’T want to reformat the drive as that will erase all of the valuable data that you are trying to recover. It shouldn’t be that hard to get to your data, so let’s look at our options.

External Hard Drive

The IcyBox is an external hard drive enclosure that is used to pull data off of a drive or for extra storage. To use it, you take the old drive out of your laptop and put it in the external hard drive, then hook that up to your working computer using either a USB port, FireWire or SATA. It sounds as if you have already checked to see that it is not the USB port, as the external drive also does not work when attached to a different computer. Although the IcyBox is new, it’s possible that it is defective. Can you get a refund or replacement on that particular unit? If so, I would try a different one and see if the drive will be recognized by your computer.

Use as a Slave Drive

Using an external hard drive enclosure should be the easiest way to go, but you can also set your old hard drive up as a slave in a working computer so that you can pull the data off of it. Here is a basic outline of the process:

Shut down the computer and unplug it.
Open the case of the working computer.
Find the jumper somewhere on the top of the defective drive. You want to set the jumper to “slave”.
Put the drive into an empty bay in the computer.
Now find the hard drive cable and connect the very end of the cable to the slave drive and connect the middle of the cable to the drive that was already in the computer.
Now connect the power connector and put the case back on.
Boot up and try to recover your data.

There is a nicely detailed set of instructions complete with video and photos on the DTI Data tutorial website. This is another option for you if you don’t want to go through the trouble of getting a new external hard drive enclosure.
In any case, your data should be recoverable using one of these methods.