Is it possible to move the drive from one WD HDD to another?

[Nicole]

I have a 6 month old My book live which I used instead of my laptop hdd.  I have been a busy gal and haven't had much time to back up the information to one of my other hard drives   Bad I know!  I would have never suspected that a basically new hdd would fail.

My mbl crashed and now I am trying to find a solution to see if the data is recoverable without having to pay for data recovery.  WD tech supports seemed positive that becasue my mbl starts up, has a blue light, but won't turn a solid green that my data is still recoverable.

I am not computer savy, so I don't have a huge knowledge base to go off of and have read some of the debricking solutions and they just look like gobbly **bleep** to me.

I don't own a desk top to take the hdd out and install it into, but is it possible to take the hard drive out of the mbl and put it in either my old my book elements or my book studio case to retrieve the data?

Thanks in advance for your advice

[Myron]

If the blue light is on then the drive should still be operational. for some reason the MBL's operating system has become poorly. That's what it seems like.

Yes, you could attach the drive to a SATA-to-USB bridge and connect it as an external drive. For Windows you'll need to install a Lunux EXT2/3/4 file system driver to be able to access the data on the MBL's drive and then when that is done, just copy everything out of the MBL's drive onto your laptop.

This Google search should help getting the right file system driver for Windows.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=windows+ext4&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

If it's Linux then just follow the usual procedures to mount the disc and partitions.

[Tim182]

Could I attach the driver directly to my Sata port to read and safe the data (using a ext4 driver)?

[Myron]

Yes

[Nicole]

Thank you for trying to help me. Unfortunately, I can only try and read the data for so long before I have to return the mbl to Western Digital   I couldn't find a bridge so I tried an enclosure and that didn't work.  Everytime I tried, every program asked me to format the disk prior to reading   Using one of the programs, it was able to read the partitions and tell me how much was saved on each one.  So I still remain hopeful that the data can be recovered, I just doubt that due to my limited computer skills I can't do it.

[TonyPh12345]

Well, your computer (the one reading the disk) needs to understand the filesystem in use; EXT4.

It's not NTFS or FAT32, thus won't be natively readable from Windows.

[Myron]

But there are file system drivers out there which will allow this to be done.  I have a EXT2 formatted fixed disc here and with a file system driver it appears under Windows Explorer like any other attached drive.  [But you already know that's possible.    ]

https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&site=&source=hp&q=windows+ext4+driver&...