HDD not booting

[shinkamalei]

I tried to keep the title simple. The other day I went to bed and when I woke up, my computer has restarted and could no longer read my HDD. I fiddled around with it to the point that it saw the drive, but then I had to go to school. Come back today and pop in the windows 10 CD to try to boot with it and repair, only to get multiple errors. First it said the drive was locked so I tried using cmd to see what I could do. Followed this: http://windowsreport.com/drive-windows-installed-locked/

To see what I could do. When I did rebuild it didn't find any windows installations. Which I found odd.

Now before you ask if I changed anything before it happened - yes, about 24 hours before. I tried rolling back, I tried repairing, I tried every option under the troubleshoot. Everything to go back prior to me trying to fix an error which vexed me. The one where the start menu gets a fatal error and I have to sign out. I used ALL the steps on this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIwiTJhNFrs

As I am in school(just started) for programming, we have an IT guy in the class and he didn't have much hope in me getting this fixed and gave me a SSD 250GB to try to install windows 10 on.

But this has ALL my artwork and coding and games and everything. I just didn't have a chance to back it up

 

[Luminary]

Hello shinkamalei,

Sorry to hear about your drive failing.

Precursor: If you have material that MUST be recovered your best bet is to send the drive to a professional data recovery centre. Fair warning, they still might not be able to get your data and they can be very very expensive.

If you want to try and recover the data yourself:

-Have you tried accessing the disk as a non-boot drive? (ie, having it installed in your system along side the SSD, or placing it in an external drive).

-If you can see/ open the disk from the My Computer window then you should be able to pull the data you want to keep off the disk manually, which would be the best option

If you can see the disk in disk management but it doesn't show up in 'My Computer' you could try the Recuva recovery software.

Here are the steps for trying Recuva:

1) Either mount the disk as a secondary drive in your current rig, or put it in an external drive and attach it via USB
2) Ensure you can at least see the drive in disk management
3) If the drive shows up, run Recuva to recover the data (just be sure you have another drive big enough to hold it all if you get this far)

Data recovery software is always a long-shot, so don't hold your breath. This is a good example of why we always recommend people have two backups of their data, one local and one remote.

Best of luck, I hope you're able to recover your data.

 

[shinkamalei]

I will be trying it as a non-boot drive after I finish reading text for class. I actually do have the recuva software on that HDD. Thankfully since I have a new ssd, if I can see the items I will copy over as much as I can. Sad thing is this is the third HDD to die on me since 2009. all seagate. Never going with them again. And I keep my PCs clean.

Is there anything I should look for in a data recovery specialist? Anything to know in specific I guess.

 

[Luminary]

Since it is a Seagate drive you could look into their Seagate In-Lab recovery. The nice thing about that is that they don't charge you if the data isn't recovered:

http://www.seagate.com/services-software/recover/in-lab-recovery/

Also, since it sounds like you might be in the market for a cloud-based backup as well after having so many HDD failures over the past few years here are two very good and affordable options to consider:

Crashplan
Backblaze