Old working hard drive unallocated space

[MangledPC]

First post, so sorry if it’s not in the right category. I’ve had a hard drive sitting in a cupboard for quite a few years and recently have put it into my computer to check what data is on it. It was previously used in a home computer, however on Hard drive Manager (Win10) it appears only as ‘Unallocated space’ is there a way to recover this data? Thanks Lachy

[Bruce]

unallocated means that before your PC can read from it, it needs to be formatted, and therein lies the problem.

one avenue may be to do a Quick Format, that’ll renew the MBR portion of the drive and leave the files alone - sort of.
access to the files will be lost as the tables containing that info will also be wiped. but the file data will still be there.
a recovery program like Recuva may help from there.
it certainly won’t get everything and it may very well take hours to scan but there’s a chance.

another concern is I’m assuming the drive was OK when it was shelved, so the rhetorical question is what has made it unallocated?

[Rustys]

You can also use a live version of Linux and see of you can see the data.

[phillpower2]

Any update MangledPC?

[phillpower2]

Thread closed due to lack of any feedback from the OP.