Dead / Corrupted Hard Drive - Have some questions

[LJC]

Hello Everyone,

 

Per Dennis D's suggestion I have moved my initial post to a separate topic instead of replying to another thread.

 

I have a dead/corrupted hard drive too. I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 about six months ago.  Everything was running fine until three weeks ago.  The hard drive on my laptop got corrupted and it was stuck on the screen before the login window. The mouse and keyboard only work in the BIOS menu once I was able to get it to boot to the BIOS. I tried several times to get the OS to get past the login in screen. I finally took it to Staples and they ran a virus and malware check and cleaned it up. I did not notice until I got home that the laptop was still in the same condition as before the tech worked on it. I used Windows 10 recovery from NEOSMART but it did not fix the problem. It did, however, tell me that it could not see my data. I took it to back to Staples to see if they could recover my data. No such luck. I had them remove the hard drive and brought everything home.

 

I slaved the hard drive to the laptop I'm using via a USB 2.0 to SATA adapter. The hard drive was assigned a drive letter but the system said that it needed to format it to read it. I did not format the drive. The laptop I'm currently using a HP 2000 Notebook. It has an AMD E-450 APU processor, 4GB RAM and Windows 10 64-bit OS.  Can I run Recuva on this machine to fix my dead/corrupted hard drive. Should I restore this laptop back to Windows 7? I'm considering purchasing the Recuva Professional.

 

Thanks,

LJC

[DennisD]

Hi LJC.

 

I'm not sure as to whether I can give you a definitive solution, but in the absence of any other input I can give you my thoughts and maybe a couple of suggestions/options.

 

Firstly, purchasing Recuva Pro will not give you a better "scanning/recovery" option. The Pro version will give you a few different features and priority support from Piriform, but will not do a better job than the free version. Also, Recuva can not fix a drive, only scan it for files.

 

Secondly, if the slaved drive has been given a drive letter, then that's a very good start.

 

Thirdly, the fact that Windows is asking you to format the drive means that it sees the drive as "Raw". This simply means that the corruption is probably in the boot sectors of the drive, which in turn means that Windows has no info from that part of the drive to tell it what's actually on there, including the type of file system.

 

As long as the drive hasn't been formatted, then for all intents and purposes your data should still be there. The only problem is getting at it.

 

Can I assume that you would be happy to get your personal data and then reinstall Windows afterwards? That's the plan anyway.

 

Can I run Recuva on this machine to fix my dead/corrupted hard drive. Should I restore this laptop back to Windows 7?

 

 

I assume from that statement that you haven't yet ran Recuva. If not, try running it and make sure in "Options/Actions" you select "Scan for non deleted files". I would also suggest selecting "Restore Folder Structure". This will display any recovered files in the same folder structure they inhabited on the problem drive, which makes choosing what you want to recover a lot easier IMHO.

 

If this doesn't work then try selecting "Deep Scan", which may take some time depending upon the size of the drive. If you do have some success then remember to recover to a different drive. Obvious probably, but worth a mention.

 

Finally, if you have no success with Recuva, then there are other options, but one thing at a time.