A couple days ago my mom's laptop's SSD became unbootable. I thought maybe this was just a corruption of the boot partition, but when I checked the BIOS the disk wasn't listed anywhere. I tried reseating it, and still no luck. I've also tried it in another computer, same issue.
Today I got an M.2-to-USB device, which works for both NVMe and SATA, and is able to successfully read other disks of both types. However when I plug in this one, it's as if I didn't insert the disk at all. The device shows up on /dev/sdb, but a hexdump outputs literally NOTHING.
There are some absolutely critical files on that disk and I need to recover them. There's no visible physical damage to the disk, and it doesn't get excessively warm or anything. It's been kept inside the laptop up until this point, so I don't see how static damage would have occurred.
It's a SK Hynix HFS256G39TNH-73A0A/SC401M280S (The M/N scheme is very confusing).
And yes, I know, the data should have been backed up, and I'm going to set up backups to my instance of NextCloud. But for now, I need this data. Any idea what went wrong? Is there a software tool that can recover the data (and not send it anywhere)? How much would a DR company cost?
