Question "Failed to Repair," restarts, and other woes

awakeandalive

Honorable
May 4, 2013
6
0
10,510
I have a Dell XPS8300. I upgraded the RAM to 32gb and had to upgrade the BIOS to the latest (but still 2014) version to make it work. Did that, all well for a few days. Then one day I shut it down, and the next I turn it back on, and it won't load Windows. All I get is a blue screen and "Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC." I have tried all of the 'Advanced Option' after Windows couldn't repair start-up on its own, and then can't even get a Dell recovery image for a USB because the recovery tool won't recognize the service tag and the website doesn't offer it as a download. I spent a couple hours following YouTube videos to fix it, along with attempts at command prompt stuff (but keeping running into 'Access Denied.')

So, after admitting defeat, I pulled the hard drive and put it in a hard drive enclosure and plugged it into my laptop. It recognizes it, and even shows 609gb used (which is right), and various folders. However, I can't find my files in any of the them (there are actually very few files in there). What am I missing? It appears the drive is good because it loads as a secondary drive, shows the right amount of data being used, lets me open the folders it does show, Windows says there's no bad sectors and it's not fragmented... so, what am I missing?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions!
 

britechguy

Commendable
Jul 2, 2019
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243
1,340
When you have that drive attached as an external drive I suggest you run SeaTools (or its own manufacturer's diagnostic suite) on it.

I suspect that the drive is failing. And there are all sorts of "intermediate states" between normal and dead.
 

awakeandalive

Honorable
May 4, 2013
6
0
10,510
I found it to be a Hitachi drive so I google'd the model. Turns out they're now Western Digital. So I downloaded their utility and am currently running the long test (the quicktest showed everything with green checkmarks and to be "healthy," so we will see if this changes it). Will report back when it is done...
 

britechguy

Commendable
Jul 2, 2019
1,479
243
1,340
The fact that you cannot access your data is what suggests to me that there is something wrong with this drive.

You state that no drive encryption has been involved, and if that's the case the drive should be "plug n' play" on another machine after you've allowed permissions to be granted to access it (which you typically get prompted for very shortly after connecting it and trying to use File Explorer).

I really don't know what to tell you.

This is another of those teachable moments, and not meant to pour salt in an open wound, but this is why having an external backup drive and taking regular, cyclic full system image as well as separate user data backups is essential. Failures of myriad kinds can occur from which recovering gracefully is either impossible or grotesquely expensive. Having those backups means you'll be back up and running in under an hour even if your main system drive were to vanish into thin air and need to be replaced.