Sorry if this is not the place to ask I also tried on a different instance as well

I bought an adapter to retrieve old files from ancient hard drives and I didn’t save the stuff from one I had looked at. Now though when I plug it in it will only read as an android file system? It has 2 disk images now, one is labeled Presario D: which shows up as an android backup or something but all folders are empty. The other is Local Disk E: and if I click it it literally just locks up my file explorer to the point I have to restart the PC.

Any thoughts or ideas?

I may have plugged it into an android phone at some point? Not sure though.

  • clb92@feddit.dkEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Does windows call it “Android file system”? Because as far as I know, Android usually uses EXT4, which is also what many Linux systems use by default. But it could also be corrupted filesystem or dying drive.

    Try booting into a Linux USB. Linux in general can in some cases be more forgiving with failing hard drives, whereas Explorer in Windows sometimes just freezes until it gets a response from the drive.

    If you can’t see and mount the filesystem (preferably as read-only), take a look at tools like ddrescue (better than plain old dd with dying drives) and testdisk (to recover data from corrupted partitions). The “proper” procedure is to make a full disk image (or as much as it can read) and then try to recover the data from that disk image, so the potentially failing drive is used as little as possible.