HDD data recovery advice

Question

I found my assumed long lost “win98” toshiba protege laptop in our wet and moldy storage container. Was there for years, through cold-humid variances.

The files on his computer are extremely important/private, and I need some advice.

I’ve dried out the laptop and removed the hard drive. Although the machine itself appeared soaked and sporadically covered in mold, the drive itself appears to be in great physical shape with almost no corrosion.

I have not plugged it in, I have not opened it.

What is my best route to ensure I safely recover the data?

1. Send to popular and trusted data recovery service? My data crucial, yes I understand the audit certifications that protect privacy, but I’m still weary, so this is a last resort.

2. Buy IDE to usb connector and see if it boots? Scared to do this bc I may damage the disc. Do I need to remember my password for win98 if I go this route.

3. Find an independent that has a air curtain/clean room that will do the work in my presence and use my offline machine? Is this an outlandish request?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Buy IDE to usb connector and see if it boots?

Close, but not quite. Do not try to boot the drive. That will almost certainly not work. What you want to do is simply read the drive on a new computer.

The act of simply turning on the drive could cause problems. No guarantee. But my hunch is that it will either work OK (in which case, you copy the files as quickly as you can and then turn off the drive because even if it does work, there are problems that can happen the longer it is on, so this gives you the best chance of another try later) or it won't work much at all (e.g., not spin up, or spin up but be unreadable).

If it won't spin up then the only practical choice is a data recovery company.

If it spins up and your new computer recognizes the drive but has trouble reading files, then there is often some hope of recovering the files without sending the drive elsewhere, but that will depend on the specifics.

Unless you had full-drive encryption (very unlikely on a consumer Windows 98 machine), no passwords will be needed.

If you are able to do so, you may want to try first reading the drive on a Linux system (which could be "boot your new Windows computer using a USB with Linux on it") as that will minimize the stuff that operating systems, especially Windows, like to do when connecting to a drive.

Answer 2

If you are mainly concerned about successfully recovering the data, then the safest route is to hand it over to a trustworthy data recovery professional. They will have more knowledge and tools at their disposal to be successful than you will. Alas, you say this is your "last resort"...

Option #2 is not unreasonable. USB-to-IDE adapters are inexpensive and work well on many modern computers when connecting old FAT32 format hard drives, which is what you seem to have.

Also, the data on your FAT32 drive is probably unencrypted. You won't need any passwords to read the entirety of the file system from a modern computer via USB.

If you try this, the first few seconds of powering the HD and listening to it (try to) spin up will tell a lot. If it doesn't spin up normally and quietly, then there is physical damage, and you may have just made it worse. But, you already knew that before you went down this path. On the other hand, maybe the HD is perfectly functional and you can now backup your files.

It is a risk vs. reward quandary, but you already knew this too.