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Need advice about an old hard drive
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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When it comes to old drives, you may very well only get one good read out of it before its gone for good. (Or at least solidly in a very pricey data recovery service territory)
If you have the means to do so, consider a data recovery service first and foremost if you can't afford it or don't want to proceed on
So the first thing you want to do is make a byte-by-byte raw image of the drive(s) with a tool like this https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
BUT you will need a destination drive that's at least the same size as your source. So if your old drive is 500GB you'll need a destination that has 500GB free or more. Id personally go a tad bigger because ya never know and remember this might be the last time you get a good read
Second it sounds like you did plug it into android and it tried adding in it's default folders, but 1) it probably picked up the 500MB or so tiny boot partition windows makes 2) it only adds folders, it doesn't wipe partitions.
So in both your data is probably fine BUT
It does sound like your drive isnt particularly healthy, so until you're ready to make that image keep it offline and disconnected
Once you have the image, you do all your work from there and keep your source drive safe until you're 100% you don't need it anymore
Appreciate that thank you!
AFTER you have the disk image my goto tool would be photorec, but there are other tools
I would go for at least 2x the free space as the old drive, the first 1x is for the drive image, the second is for recovered files.
Hear, hear! Spent so Goddamn much time trying to recover a 256gb drive onto a 500gb drive when I had a stinking 1tb drive sitting in the next room! Just thinking about it makes me owe the swear jar another 2$!