- Sep 1, 2016
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Dear Tom's Hardware Community,
I know this question has been asked a thousand times and I realize my post is incredibly long. My predicament, however, might be a little bit different. So please bear with me..
Last year I purchased a Lenovo Y50-70. It shipped with Windows 8.1 but I upgraded to 10 as soon as I could. The drive the computer came with, a WD Black 1TB hybrid drive with an 8GB cache, has recently ceased booting.
One day, after restarting, my computer decided to boot up way slower than usual and I eventually got stuck attempting to log in. After sitting on a black screen (after entering my login details) for a long while I did a forced shutdown via power button. Since then the HDD has become unbootable. The drive is recognized in bios but hangs on start-up at the Lenovo splash screen indefinitely.
I've attempted to repair the drive using "stock" methods such as the Lenovo recovery USB, Windows recovery media -both Windows 10 and 8.1, and the Lenovo automatic repair feature. All of the above methods have led to failure (all of the above repair methods wouldn't even launch unless I tweaked some settings in BIOS like booting Legacy first). The repair options cease working before any options are presented to repair the drive. Both the Windows and Lenovo repair media cease to work after "loading files" and just sit on a black screen indefinitely. The Lenovo automatic repair function performs similarly and sits on a black screen or on seemingly random occasions decides to restart after sitting on a black screen for an extended period.
I tried booting in safe-mode to no avail. No key combination (such as shift-F8) works, and I'm pretty sure that's because Windows 8 essentially phased that functionality out.
SO, being at a loss on what to do next (and being unwilling to pay Lenovo a buttload of cash to repair the drive) I ordered a hard drive enclosure and threw the drive in to see if I could just pull the files off of it. The HDD is recognized as two separate drive letters when viewed via My PC although neither drive letter is accessible through explorer. I figured opening up Disk Management and taking a peek at the drive would yield some answers. Instead, I found that Disk Management hangs on "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service" when the drive is plugged in.
Now hang on to your shorts because things get a little confusing from here on out. If Disk Management is open and I plug the drive in, the drive pops up with the correct partitions (Although it does not state the partitions are healthy). However, if I attempt to do anything to the drive within disk management (even just clicking on a partition) disk management becomes unresponsive. I've also attempted using diskpart to see if I could at least see the drive that way but diskpart never launches so I assume something similar to the disk management issue is happening.
I am seeking advice on what I could do next to get this drive working. I am a starving college student and taking this somewhere for data recovery is pretty much out of the question (I did have my important files backed up, although there is some saved-game data and other misc. items that I would still like off the drive. Besides the drive having issues with 100% disk usage despite not having any intensive programs or file transfers running the drive has performed flawlessly up until the point it stopped booting.
I know this question has been asked a thousand times and I realize my post is incredibly long. My predicament, however, might be a little bit different. So please bear with me..
Last year I purchased a Lenovo Y50-70. It shipped with Windows 8.1 but I upgraded to 10 as soon as I could. The drive the computer came with, a WD Black 1TB hybrid drive with an 8GB cache, has recently ceased booting.
One day, after restarting, my computer decided to boot up way slower than usual and I eventually got stuck attempting to log in. After sitting on a black screen (after entering my login details) for a long while I did a forced shutdown via power button. Since then the HDD has become unbootable. The drive is recognized in bios but hangs on start-up at the Lenovo splash screen indefinitely.
I've attempted to repair the drive using "stock" methods such as the Lenovo recovery USB, Windows recovery media -both Windows 10 and 8.1, and the Lenovo automatic repair feature. All of the above methods have led to failure (all of the above repair methods wouldn't even launch unless I tweaked some settings in BIOS like booting Legacy first). The repair options cease working before any options are presented to repair the drive. Both the Windows and Lenovo repair media cease to work after "loading files" and just sit on a black screen indefinitely. The Lenovo automatic repair function performs similarly and sits on a black screen or on seemingly random occasions decides to restart after sitting on a black screen for an extended period.
I tried booting in safe-mode to no avail. No key combination (such as shift-F8) works, and I'm pretty sure that's because Windows 8 essentially phased that functionality out.
SO, being at a loss on what to do next (and being unwilling to pay Lenovo a buttload of cash to repair the drive) I ordered a hard drive enclosure and threw the drive in to see if I could just pull the files off of it. The HDD is recognized as two separate drive letters when viewed via My PC although neither drive letter is accessible through explorer. I figured opening up Disk Management and taking a peek at the drive would yield some answers. Instead, I found that Disk Management hangs on "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service" when the drive is plugged in.
Now hang on to your shorts because things get a little confusing from here on out. If Disk Management is open and I plug the drive in, the drive pops up with the correct partitions (Although it does not state the partitions are healthy). However, if I attempt to do anything to the drive within disk management (even just clicking on a partition) disk management becomes unresponsive. I've also attempted using diskpart to see if I could at least see the drive that way but diskpart never launches so I assume something similar to the disk management issue is happening.
I am seeking advice on what I could do next to get this drive working. I am a starving college student and taking this somewhere for data recovery is pretty much out of the question (I did have my important files backed up, although there is some saved-game data and other misc. items that I would still like off the drive. Besides the drive having issues with 100% disk usage despite not having any intensive programs or file transfers running the drive has performed flawlessly up until the point it stopped booting.
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