A little help with diagnosing a crashed laptop (Asus Zenbook)

[vortex19609]

I'm trying to diagnose a laptop that crashed, possibly due to malware or virus, and want to view the installed hard drives from the Windows environment. I created a bootable windows 10 flash drive, which surprisingly works great. Unfortunately, I can't see the installed drives when in windows. The only one listed is the flash drive. In Disk management the drives are detected but not only aren't assigned a drive letter but show as 100% free space available. I know this is incorrect, there is data on the drives. The drives are listed as "offline". If I activate them, will the data contained on them be safe? I'm not worried about getting the flash drive infected (if that's the problem) because it will never be used on anything other than this specific laptop. It is absolutely crucial I don't damage any of the data contained on them. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Doctor Rob]

When things like that happen (computer will not boot) and you need the info from it because you didn't back it up.. What I ALWAYS do is unplug it (or remove the battery if possible)(that's just for safety).. Then pull the drive out of the computer that is messed up. and plug it into a different computer in a external USB drive bay. THEN check your data if its there or not from the other computer.. as it could be the drive died.. and is messed up. Back it up then and reinstall windows on the other computer (after putting it back together) after doing some more work as maybe its a motherboard issue or drive is bad.. OR just take it into a computer shop and ask them to see about the data you have. THEN do what I do back things up.. I use an external drive as backup #1 then #2 is an online backup (like backblaze).

 

[sir_k]

All I have for advice at the moment is: retrieve your files (if at all possible) before playing around with re-installation.
I'm not sure I understand your exact symptoms; you say it "crashed", but you refer to "when in windows". Is the computer usable to the state that you can log in etc. to use Disk Management?

 

[vortex19609]

I took the plunge and activated the drives. All the data was fine, thank God. I'll leave this here to say "thank you" to those who responded to my message, all is well. Thanks for your time.