Data Recovery with external enclosure

[stephie206]

Hi All,

I got an external enclosure thinking I could easily use it to get the data off of the hard drive of an old laptop. My new laptop reads the HD just fine, but it only finds the systems folders, applications, etc. It's not finding the documents, photos etc. that I am looking for in the "Users folder". I've tried various recovery software thinking it's a partition issue, but then I just get a bunch of files with no file names, not ideal. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Data recovery software does not recover filenames and such, it only sees what format the file is in and what it consists of.

Have you tried showing hidden files in Finder to see, if you can browse the user folder in the USERS folder you are looking for?

It may just be a permission setting, since the old Mac probably had a different user account than the current one has? If so, right click on the external HDD and select GET INFO and under Sharing & Permissions set it to Ignore Ownership and your user to READ & WRITE rights and then click the little gear icon to apply it to all subfolders and files (items).


How to Set File Permissions in Mac OS X

 

[stephie206]

I did try that and it's strange, when I "Get Info" for the folder I am trying to access it says 280.5 MB for 0 items. I'm not sure but think it might have said 0 bytes before I changed the permissions. So it did do something but I still can't see the files.

 

[stephie206]

I showed the hidden files using the Terminal too and still can't find them. When I ran the recovery software all these Office Docs, etc showed up but I can't find them otherwise.