My uncle has a maxtor one touch 4 external hard drive, But he doesn't have the computer is was linked to and he wants me to get the files off for him. How would i go about accessing it. He isn't a hurry so i can play around with, Any ideas?
You could always use some flavour of Linux like Ubuntu or Mint and just use the live cd and then you'll be able to access the files from there on your pc.
I'll give that a try, Thanks.
I tried opening it in ubuntu, But i couldn't see the hard drive. I ran some disk checks, The short one passed but the long one failed, I can't find if that means it's dead for sure or not. Also i'm not sure if it is encrypted or not since i can't see it in linux and in windows i don't see a way to open it.
In ubuntu were you able to see the disk in the Disks application? I know sometimes I have to go in there and mount the drive for it to show up and to be able to access it. If the disk seems to be failing though that could be a problem. If you can get your hands on a copy of SpinRite: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm This program does a really deep scan and looks at every sector of the drive and can sometimes repair those sectors enough so you can get the data off. I use this at work on a daily basis.
I don't use ubuntu, but in arch you could
Run lsblk to find the hard drive and its partitions
mount /dev/sd** (the letter and number from lsblk) /mnt
And then everything on the partition you mounted will be inside /mnt
Maybe this pretty to haxy but still good read:
If this is windows box you will need following:
- Something to cool down ram to negative temp (liquid nitrogen maybe)
- 2nd computer which will be used to dump data from ram.
When windows boots up the encryption key is loaded into memory (even though its not entered yet) (security hole) also note that ram is not going to loose the data once out of power - if you super cool it. This way you can simply swap the memory to different pc and copy data from it or simply extract encryption code right away and then simply decrypt the drive in matter of secs.
I have been busy with work so i haven't been able to try more with Linux, But i'll try your suggestions when i get a chance. I don't think i could get any liquid nitrogen, But it's an interesting idea.
A side question, How do i get e-mail notifications set up?