Accessing old hard disc

jjgreenwood

jjgreenwood

jjgreenwood

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21 May 2010
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550
Hi

Back in 2007 I did a bit of bitcoin mining and probably managed to mine 1.5-2 bitcoins. After 18 months I gave up on it and eventually changed computers but kept the old hard discs. One of them an SSD I formatted at some point so I know that will need to go to a data recovery company to try and get any of the old data off it. The other a Samsung HD103SJ I am trying to access via windows 11 and can't for the life of me work out how to do it. It is visible in the bios, windows device manager can see it and it shows as enabled but it is not present in file explorer. Has anyone got any ideas on how I can see the data and find out if my old bitcoin wallet is on it?
 
Open Disk Manager and see if it's listed in there. It might not have any partitions on it. Don't attemept to make any partitions if you want to recover data. Data recovery software should be able to see and access the drive as it is.
 
I wouldn't do anything to the drive that involves any writing to it, no matter how little it is.

Recuva is made by the same people who made CCleaner and it does do a good job, but I think it just supports the basic file systems like NTFS, FAT and FAT32.

I do also like DMDE as it supports more file systems and you feel as though you have more control over it, but it only lets you recover a few files at a time.
 
Partition wizard, easeus, acronis iirc. All have disc tools and recovery software.
Try free versions, see how the drive shows up.
Write nothing /change nothing on the drive if possible don't even recover partitions until you've got a sector by sector image/copy of the drive, just in case.

Can probably just recover the partitions if they are detected, but you never know, and obv don't want to risk losing those btc just to save time/a little bit of money.

Free undelete is a basic tool to read data from a drive that has been formatted/files deleted, although as soon as things get written over they get more and more corrupted.
 
jjgreenwood said:
I've managed to read the drive using an external enclosure. Bad news it doesn't have the bitcoins on it so they must have been on the formatted SSD.
Click to expand...
You can recover stuff from formatted drives
Especially if nothing has been written on them afterwards
Even if stuff has been written
Have done it even after I installed windows
It doesn't mean it has overwritten what you want to recover
With a ssd more of a worry would be
If its not been powered on in a long time
They're susceptible to bit rot if unpowered too long
 
Is it finding any files at all?
Bit rot wouldn't stop it working
Would be the data that would be corrupted or unreadable
was the ssd shoved away somewhere and left
with no power for years?

And if you could recover it I assume you would
Be able to open it?
No idea but guessing it's passworded
Or secured somehow?
 
What exactly are you looking for on the drive anyway? You want the wallet file, I'm guessing it's just a password protected file? I assume you do you not have the recovery phrase/private key anywhere else?

What's the ssd situation, formatted and then used for years or formatted then unused?
 
jjgreenwood said:
Hi

Back in 2007 I did a bit of bitcoin mining and probably managed to mine 1.5-2 bitcoins. After 18 months I gave up on it and eventually changed computers but kept the old hard discs. One of them an SSD I formatted at some point so I know that will need to go to a data recovery company to try and get any of the old data off it. The other a Samsung HD103SJ I am trying to access via windows 11 and can't for the life of me work out how to do it. It is visible in the bios, windows device manager can see it and it shows as enabled but it is not present in file explorer. Has anyone got any ideas on how I can see the data and find out if my old bitcoin wallet is on it?
Click to expand...
assign a drive letter to the drive in disk management then you can see it in explorer
 
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