Why is my laptop hard drive wiped after removing it from my laptop?

Question

HI there, our user has a acer laptop, we removed the hard drive from the laptop and then attached a USB converter to it.
Our plan was to use norton ghost 2003 to save all the data from that hard drive into an image. and transfer it to a much bigger hard drive.

I selected the "Backup" on norton ghost and tried backup the drive. The thing is it failed because ghost cannot find a USB driver.

Now once the pc was back to windows, i removed the hard drive from the USB connector and placed it back to the laptop.

To my surprise, my laptop won't boot up, so when i removed the hard drive again. put it back to the USB and cheked the contents, my drive was wipped out! C: and D: are clean. and when I try to open also the drive, it prompt me with this Drive not formatted.

Can anybody explain to me what happend? My boss was really upset with me, and I don't know what to say actually, They believe I messed up, but I don't even know how.

Sorry did I saw Acer. I meant ASUS.

It was an ASUS S5000

Answer 1

If I'm honest, it sounds like you have a failed drive. Any time a disk of any sort gives out a "Dive not formatted" error when you're sure that the drive has previously been formatted, you're looking at some major trouble.

It is possible that any number of things could have happened. While handling it, did you observe proper guidelines for handling electrostatic sensitive equipment? Did the drive come in contact with any magnetic interference, or was subjected to anything magnetic? Did you drop or damage the drive? If you're sure that you've done the following correctly, you may as well check to make sure that the plugs on the drive and on the usb enclosure are making good contact with the drive and also making sure the drive is receiving ample power (some USB enclosures for 2.5" laptop drives don't have a power jack and simply draw power from the USB port to run the drive. If you can power the drive using an external AC adapter, give that a shot).

If all else fails, try giving the drive power and just listen very closely to it, to make sure it's spooling properly. It very well could be that the drive itself has failed outright. If this is the case, the drive's data may still be intact, but you will need a professional to restore the data.

Answer 2

Hi. It may be a Windows Genuine Advantage problem, since the WGA file would not recognize that it was the same computer. Add the drive to another PC as a slave, copy the data, and tell them you are a genius for figuring this out.

Answer 3

Hi - yes you can delete and format your hard drive from the enclosure - yes people can recover your files if you just do that. Undelete and disk recovery tools work really well (useful when you loose your data by mistake!) - go look for "free file scrubbing" on google there are lots of tools available to (try to) prevent recovery of your files (basically by filling up the disk several times with garbage, physically overwriting your files instead of just putting an index in front of them saying they were "deleted"). To be complete, if you have any data interesting for forensic people, you should just destroy the drive, as even scrubbing is not fail proof and experts can still recover the files if they really want to spend lots of time (and money) on that work! B.

Answer 4

Possible re-write of the drive due to the fact you can plug them in upside down,try turning it over and plugging it in and cross your fingers.I did that with an older one a while back,but things have changed some.

Answer 5

2 suggestions...

1) Was there software installed that would have destroyed data if it were removed?

2) Was the drive encrypted with some type of BIOS protection that would have wiped it when removed?

Interesting question.