Peenie Wallie

Tools you'll need:

1 set of very small screwdrivers. Walgreen's carries a perfect little 7 piece screwdriver set in their home tool section with 3 philips heads and 4 flat heads for $2.19 (tax included.)
1 flashlight
1 2.5" hard drive enclosure. Central Computers in San Francisco carries a Comkia MobiMe G3 External 2.5" Hard Drive Enclosure for $19.66 (tax included).

So, I get home and I flip over the Sony Vaio VPCYB15KX laptop and start pulling screws. Turns out you only need to pull 3 though. Then, the center section (on the bottom) just sort of pops out. Be careful though. Don't break anything.

I should point out at this point that you should not be wearing socks and standing on carpet. Static electricity will ruin your day at this point. If you have a grounding wire, put it on. If you don't, then at least a) take off your shoes and b) get off of the carpet. Find a linoleum or concrete floor and c) touch something metal to ground yourself.

OK. So, you're not charged up with static electricity. You're not wearing slippers and standing on carpet. OK.

Now, you'll see that there are two screws still holding the 2.5" drive in place. Pull these two screws. Try not to lose them. Now, the hard drive should slide out.

At this point, you can open the Comkia MobiMe G3 Enclosure box. Go ahead and start reading the directions. You'll want to cry. But don't give up so easily. All is not lost.

The directions say:

2. Installation of hard drive
- "Unscrew the front panel."
- "Remove the drive tray from the enclosure."
- "Insert your hard drive into the tray and connect it to the proper cables/plug."
- "Screw the hard drive into the tray with the provided screws."
- "Insert the tray back into the enclosure and connect the cables"
- "Connect the enclosure to your computer"

Here are the directions, followed by my notes in brackets.
2. Installation of hard drive
- "Unscrew the front panel." [There are no screws in the front panel. Eventually, I got the top cover, the part with a label that says "Comkia MobiMe G3", to come off using my bare hands.]
- "Remove the drive tray from the enclosure. [By this, they mean that you've got to remove the green circuit board looking thing from the inside of the enclosure. I used one of the flat-head screwdrivers to get it to pop out, eventually. Be careful though because a clear piece of plastic fell onto the floor when it came out and it took me a while to find it. This is apparently a clear plastic lens/cover for a power button/light on the front?]
- "Insert your hard drive into the tray and connect it to the proper cables/plug." [I didn't think that my hard drive would actually mount onto the little circuit board. Then, I realized that the 2.5" drive was actually in a little case. Removing 4 screws removed the case, reducing the form factor of the 2.5" drive, and making it a lot closer to fitting in the enclosure. Then I realized that there was a little adapter on the pins of my hard drive, which I pulled off. Finally, the 2.5" drive was actually ready to mount onto the "tray", and I slid it into position on the tray.]
- "Screw the hard drive into the tray with the provided screws." [This was easy enough. I used 4 of the screws provided.]
- "Insert the tray back into the enclosure and connect the cables." [I was eventually able to get the clear plastic piece that fell out back in position, wiggle the tray back into position, and snap it firmly in place. I then replaced the cover. Then, I closed it up using 8 of the smallest screws on the face of the Earth (provided).]
- "Connect the enclosure to your computer". [At this point, I took their USB cable and connected the enclosure to my other Sony Vaio VGN-SZ120P laptop running Windows XP Pro.]

So, I connected the enclosure to the laptop...it recognized the device...saw it was a Hitachi 500 gig hard drive...said "hardware is installed and ready for use" or words to that effect. Appeared in Windows Explorer as a new "G" drive.

Clicked on the G drive, and it had some folders there. When I clicked on "Documents and Settings", it said "Access is denied."

Now, the "Access is denied." message is a problem I've encountered before. So I searched my website for the error and found it. Now, I'll try the same solution:

(I should mention here that I'm using a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ120P laptop running Windows XP Pro to recover data from a Sony Vaio VPCYB15KX running Windows 7.)

To resolve this issue, you must turn off Simple File Sharing, and then take ownership of the folder:
1. Turn off Simple File Sharing:
a. Click Start, and then click My Computer. (or alternately, hold down Windows key and hit he letter 'E'. Either method launches Windows Explorer.)
b. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click the View tab.
c. In the Advanced Settings box, scroll to the bottom and click to clear the 'Use simple file sharing (Recommended)' check box, and then click OK.
2. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message, if one appears.
4. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
5. In the Name list, click your user name, Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group.
If you want to take ownership of the contents of that folder, click to select the 'Replace owner on subcontainers and objects' check box. (here, I clicked something that said 'Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects.' And clicked Apply. Said 'This will remove explicitly defined permissions on all child objects and enable propagation of inheritable permissions to those child objects. Only inheritable permissions propagated from Local Disk (G: ) will take effect.
Do you wish to continue? Clicked Yes.
Says "setting security information on" and shows a bunch of files.
Now, when I click on the folder, it says it doesn't exist.

"G:\documents and settings refers to a location that is unavailable."

Brilliant. So, I'm not clear that this little exercise helped me any.

The Comkia MobiMe G3 comes with some data recovery software, but after their bang-up job on the directions for mounting the drive in the enclosure, I'm thinking that I'll try using the Recuva software first. So, I downloaded and installed the Recuva software.

Started deep scan of G:\ at 10:01 p.m. MDT. Told it to look for Photo files on the G: drive, and do a Deep Scan. Also told it to recovered undeleted photo files as well.

2 hours later, at 12:01 a.m. MDT, it claims to have discovered 85,000 files, with an estimated time left of 15 hours. So, I think I'll crash for the night, and leave it running all night, and see where we are in the morning.

12:28 a.m.
Stage 1 of 2. Scanning drive for deleted files.
Current Progress: 12%, 84,497 files found.
Estimated Time Left: 17 hours.

Update 8:44 a.m.: I got up this morning, and my RDP tunnel had collapsed, so I didn't see the any messages from the recovery utility that I was expecting to see. But it does appear to have completed successfully. It said it found "68,386 files (243,388 ignored).in 353266..."

So, I told it to recover the files to a new folder structure I created on my other laptop. I should mention here that I went into the advanced settings and told it to preserve the directory structure of the recovered files. My assumption was that, if it worked, it would make it easier for me to wade through all of the images. This appears to have worked.

I seems like it is recovering the photos successfully. Searching for files greater than 2 megs in my recovered folder structure with file names like IMG%.jpg, that were modified between 3/25/11 and 4/1/11, Windows Explorer says it sees 34,000+, and the files have valid thumbnails and are viewable.

My laptop harddrive shows it has 30 gigs of free space. So, hopefully it won't crash trying to recover all of the photos.

Current progress: 16% complete, 16,000 photos recovered, 3 hours remaining.

So, it looks like this operation is going to be successful. (Fingers crossed). Now, sure, it costs me a lot of money - nearly $23 in hardware to recover the data, but I'm happy to see my photos again. :)

12:25 p.m. Hmmm. OK. I looks like I ran out of disk space. It says it recovered 28,924 files in 6,771.39 seconds (approximately 112 minutes). However, 39,462 files were not recovered due to insufficient disk space on the laptop. Hmmm.

Previous Notes:
I'm thinking that I'll pull the hard drive on the new laptop and see if I can recover any data from it. This article seems to be on the right track of what I'll need to do I think.

Now if I can just find the adapter cable for sale here in San Francisco. I think I have a couple in Colorado, but that seems like a long way away at this point.

I believe that the new sony laptop I got is a VPCYB15KX Notebook with a 500GB SATA hard drive. So, I'll need some type of SATA enclosure that will convert that to USB, I think.

USB SATA 2.5" Hard Drive Enclosure

These guys are in San Francisco. They look like the ones I need to go check out.
http://www.centralcomputers.com/
837 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: (415) 495-5888