Today, my old Macbook stopped working. I still have a lot of important data on it, so I decided to demount its HDD. Then I connected it to another PC (Windows 10 AU) via a USB to SATA adapter cable. But although the device is shown in device manager and disk management, it is not visible in explorer - and I'm not able to access its files. I'm also not able to change the driver letter in disk management.
Can anyone provide a solution for that?
The reason that your computer can see the drive, but can't browse the files, is because the hard drive has a different partition format.
Windows can read and write in FAT (File Allocation Table), NTFS (New Technology File System), and a few others used for removable media (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, USB, and the like). Your Mac hard drive uses HFS or HFS+ (Hierarchical File System), which Windows does not understand. In order to read the data from that drive on a Windows machine, you'd need to use a tool like HFS Explorer.
Assuming you were going to replace the drive in the laptop, and reinstall OS X, you could just plug the drive in to that, and copy the file there. Otherwise, if you had another computer running another Operating System, such as Mac or Linux, you could recover the data by plugging it into those machines.
Assuming the drive was formatted standard Mac OS HFS+, there are at least a couple of commercial options for this, and the possibility of a free one.
There's MacDrive. It has a 5-day free trial (not sure about functionality level), then it's $50. I used an older version of it years ago, and it was pretty seamless and user-friendly.
There's Paragon HFS+. $20, I've never used.
The only free/open-source option I've seen was Dokan, and I don't know about that state of that now (see this answer). You'd also need to find a working HFS+ FUSE driver.
