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!