I have an old HDD from a laptop and I'm trying to recover some photos from it. I connected it to my PC using a SATA to USB cable and it was recognized. However, Windows 11 is telling me that the HDD has an unsupported file system and that I need to format it to use it. Is there any way to access my photos without losing the data?
1 Answer
Definitely don’t format the drive—it would erase all your data! Have you tried checking the filesystem listed in Disk Management? If Windows isn’t recognizing it but it’s supposed to be a Windows disk, it might be using a very old file system, maybe even pre-NTFS. A Linux Live USB could help you read the files and retrieve your photos without formatting the HDD.
I can't actually find out what file system it's using. It seems I need to choose manually to see it.