Out of the blue a few days ago my Dell notebook Win 11 with a NVME M.2 drive (with UEFI) crashed, with a boot issue. The PC would not boot to Windows, only to a blue screen saying my PC needed to be repaired. Over 2 full days I tried fixing the drive using for example many utilities such as bootrec /fixmbr etc etc etc and connecting a Win 11 bootable USB drive but nothing helped.
In the blue recovery screen I was able to use the Command Line and was able to navigate to C:\ and could see all my folders and files. (And FYI I was able to use 'copy' to transfer a couple of important files to a USB drive enclosure connected to the PC.)
I finally 'gave up' trying to get the drive to boot and installed a new 500GB M.2 SSD — and thankfully I had imaged the old drive a few weeks ago so I was able to resurrect the PC using the new drive and get it running again — albeit with files that are a few weeks old.
I took the old drive and put it in a USB enclosure and connected it to my PC (and another one) and the drive is recognized but it isn't stable. With it plugged into the PC (as a USB) it will typically disconnect on its own and if you try to look at the drive in File Explorer the drive will disconnect. I haven't yet really spend any serious time investigating and playing with this old drive.
So my question is, considering I really would like to recover a bunch of files on this drive, what is my best course of action?
