Laptop HDD

[Marblerim]

Hi all,

A cousin of mine looks to have infected their laptop with a virus ( won't boot into windows ). I have taken the HDD from them, plugged into an external caddy into my spare laptop to see if I can retrieve the data ( or at least diagnose the issue more confidently ). My laptop does not recognise the HDD in disk management but I can see it in the BIOS and boot from it, replicating the error. I assumed it wasn't recognised due to insufficient power as the caddy is USB powered.

Long story short. Is it worth trying to remedy or just wipe the HDD? Its a Windows 7 home build.

Thanks in advance.

[sal]

I'm pretty sure you are getting confused.

There is no way in hell you could have booted Win7 home from a USB drive.

Some USB caddies might not appear in disk management but only in file manager as they act as USB sticks, rather than HDD

A potential solution is to boot the infected laptop from a USB thumb drive and extract the critical data, then wipe and re-install

Also windows not booting can be caused by various other things which are not viruses, in fact virus is probably 3rd or 4th down the list of suspects.

[Platypus]

A laptop drive should be okay powered from USB. I wonder if the fact it wasn't recognised is because of some corruption in the MBR or other info that 'describes' the disk to the OS. See about downloading some file recovery software (I've used Restorer2000 and RestorerUltimate in the past). Another thing I'd check is whether the drive can be seen from 'Disk Management' in Control Panel.

I'm a little confused by sal's assertion that there's no way you could boot Win7 from a USB, then the suggestion that you boot the laptop from... a USB.

Top tip: when a relative asks you about this kind of thing, just say "it's not really my area of expertise" and walk away if you can!

[sal]

I'm a little confused by sal's assertion that there's no way you could boot Win7 from a USB, then the suggestion that you boot the laptop from... a USB.

I was suggesting to boot the laptop from a USB drive running a different OS, there are plenty of dedicated to troubleshooting distributions out there. Windows 7 Home doesn't support boot from a USB drive, either HDD or thumb drive. The only way to boot Windows 7 from a USB is to create a dedicated "to go" installation

[northernladuk]

Top tip: when a relative asks you about this kind of thing, just say "it's not really my area of expertise" and walk away if you can!

This.

You could educate him on cloud backups, send him some links for new HD's and then leave it at that.