Can't find data on HDD. Why?

Hello all!

A friend asked me to recover her jpg files of her son from an older laptop hard drive, it wouldn't boot due to a corrupted OS. So, I pulled the drive, put it in an external enclosure and was using it as a regular plug and play drive. Only, there's no photos on it. There's nothing but system files showing on it, no "personal data". Her resume isn't even showing on it. And out of a 350GB hdd, it's showing only 10GB is used. So..

I'm wondering if the files not showing are some sort of security feature that HP uses, that when viewed as an external drive, the personal data of the user isn't visible?

Would really love some input on this.. I'd hate to have to tell her that all of her photos and personal data is gone. :/

Thanks!

What are the make/model of the HP laptop and hard drive?

Did you run any diagnostics on the drive? UBCD5 from the link in my signature has most HD manufacturer's diags on it.

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And out of a 350GB hdd, it's showing only 10GB is used.

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It sounds like the recovery partition is intact, but the Windows partition is messed up.

You could try running Testdisk to repair the partition, but if the drive is bad, it might be too damaged. That is also included on UBCD5.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

This is why we always tell people to make backups. Recovery is much more difficult, if not impossible.

You might even need to ownership of the USER folder, I have to.

How to take ownership and get full access to files and folders in Windows 10
http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-take-...in-windows-10/