My mother's truck was broken into this morning. The guy probably checked the locks on the neighbors' car doors too. The Neighbors have a CCTV DVR thingy, but the VGA port on it is broken. I took the HDD out and plugged it into my PC and it doesn't show up in any accessible way. Anyone got some insight that might help?
I haven't used Windows in a few years now, but I believe if you right click the drive containing the footage, there will be some form of Mount or Activate command. Those should make the drive viewable from the file explorer in Windows.
Boot into any Linux distro and check it out there; it may be some other FS type that Windows doesn't recognize. Many of those CCTV or IoT systems run on top of a linux distro or at least run the linux kernel.
Once you boot it up, my advice is to image that whole drive to a giant img file with dd in case anything happens.
See if you can right-click any of those partitions and give them a drive letter. I've seen cases where drives are accessible but Windows won't automatically give them a drive letter for some reason.
Failing that, I'd say Linux is your next bet.
If you know how (it's not hard!), I second the motion to image the drive before doing anything with it. A simple way to do this (within Linux) is using dd, piping the output through gzip (to compress it), and saving the output to a file:
dd if=/dev/sdX | gzip -c > /path/to/output/file.gz
where /dev/sdX is the device file of the hard drive (you can get this using lsblk.)
Its a linux OS. As suggested Windows is useless to you.
You need to use a Linux distro. If you just want to use a live disk, sysrescurecd is good and will have most of the tools you need.
If you run lsblk -f you'll get the file-system information for the partitions. They are probably ext3/4 in which case you can just mount it safely either thought he file manager or on the command line with mount
Did they not have a login to the system? You can access it via a network connection as well.
They lost their login. They just used the monitor it was plugged into.
