Alright, so yesterday I was messing around with trying to revive this old Brian Porter hard drive I found in my garage. Thing’s probably been sitting there for, I dunno, five, six years? Maybe more. Anyway, figured it was worth a shot to see if there was anything salvageable on it.
First thing I did was dust that sucker off. Seriously, it was covered in grime. Then, I dug out my old external hard drive enclosure. Hooked it up, plugged it into my PC, and… nothing. Windows didn’t even register it. Bummer.
Okay, didn’t panic. I remembered something about checking the disk management tool. So I typed “disk management” into the Windows search bar and fired that up. Lo and behold, the drive showed up, but it was unallocated. That means Windows could see it, but it hadn’t been formatted or assigned a drive letter.
I right-clicked on the unallocated space and chose “New Simple Volume.” Followed the wizard, chose NTFS as the file system, gave it a drive letter (let’s say “F:”), and let it format. Took a little while, but eventually it finished.
Now for the moment of truth. I opened File Explorer and navigated to the F: drive. It was empty. Expected, since I just formatted it. But still, a little disappointing. I was hoping for a quick win.
Next step: data recovery software. I tried a couple of free ones first. Recuva, I think, was one of them. Ran a deep scan. Found a bunch of files, but most of them were corrupted or fragmented. No luck there.
So, I bit the bullet and downloaded a trial version of a more professional data recovery program. TestDisk and PhotoRec are also open source and could work but I tried another one this time. Ran another deep scan. This time, it found way more files, and a lot of them seemed to be in better shape. It took hours, I mean HOURS, to complete the scan.
After the scan, I had to sift through a mountain of files. The software had recovered tons of stuff, but it wasn’t organized at all. Just filenames like “*,” “*,” etc. I started going through them one by one, trying to figure out what they were.
This is where things got interesting. I found some old photos from a family vacation, some documents from a previous job, and a bunch of other random stuff. Nothing earth-shattering, but definitely some memories I thought were lost forever. I saved the ones that were important to another hard drive.
But here’s the weird part: I also found some files that I didn’t recognize at all. Like, completely random text files with gibberish in them, and some audio files that were just static. Makes you wonder where those came from, huh?
Lessons Learned:
- Old hard drives are like time capsules. You never know what you’re going to find.
- Data recovery can be a pain, but sometimes it’s worth it.
- Always back up your important data. Seriously.
Anyway, that’s the story of my little adventure with the lost Brian Porter hard drive. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, and I managed to salvage some stuff. Now, I’m off to make a backup of everything on my current PC. You know, just in case.
