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We had an overnight power outage. In the morning my PC was beeping and stuck on the Dell splash screen. It's a Dell all-in-one Win10 PC with a SATA 2.5 1TB mechanical drive. When the machine tries to boot it goes into some sort of Dell/Bios test utility that checks hardware/media condition. That 'test' result comes up with a 'hard drive failure'.

I booted to a Windows 10 installation DVD and tried to see if it would allow me to perform the 'repair' function, but it just kept complaining about the hard drive. Next, I put a new 2.5 drive in the machine and it allowed me to install Windows 10 with no issues. I figured the drive was just bad.

I put the old drive in an SATA to USB enclosure and it connects fine to the PC but only shows the old OS as its contents and I can't see any of my personal data. I used AOMEI to see if there were any hidden partitions but I only see the 1TB disc as a whole.

Is my data lost or is it still in there somewhere? If so, how do I access it?

Kalamalka Kid
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Greenyone
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1 Answers1

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It is almost impossible to say for sure if all your data is gone. It is likely there, but possibly not practically accessible in any sort of ordered process.

To further progress data recovery consider -

  1. Get a second drive of the same (or greater, but preferably the same) size and do a bit copy of the old drive to the new drive. In this way if you hose your data worse you still have a copy. If you can use Linux, the best tool to clone the disk is likely (gnu) ddrescue.

  2. Once you have cloned the drive, try run testdisk on the clone. Testdisk will try and find partitions based on signatures and other clever stuff. If this works you will likely be able to get all your data.

  3. If testdisk does not work, try photorec (or recuva). This will likely recover SOME data, but it will loose filenames and directory structure on the data it pulls off the drive and for larger files often only partially recovers them because of fragmentation.

There are other programs you can likely use as well. I've never used it, but in the Windows world, RECUVA is often bandied around. Wondershare Recoverit also claims to be pretty good.

It occurs to me you might have an issue related to Bitlocker as well - if you do that makes things a LOT more complex. If your drive has bitlocker (Do you know if you used bitlocker? If not, do you know what version of Windows you were using? Bitlocker did not come with all versions of Windows)

davidgo
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