SSD Recovery - Seen in BIOS and Explorer but not accessible

[shevell]

I work on an IT helpdesk (despite not ahving that much of an in-depth IT knowledge) and was given an SSD from a user's personal laptop to fix. The drive holds the OS and some important documents so he wanted it recovering, and I had an as-yet unused copy of Recuva on my home PC so I offered my help. Thing is, I'm a little out of my depth having actually looked at it, and there's a pack of biscuits on the line so I need a bit of help

The drive shows in BIOS and always attempts to boot, but fails straight away and attempts auto-recovery, which also fails. Once I force a boot into my actual OS, I can see it in Explorer, but cannot load into it (Explorer /Disk Manager takes upwards of five minutes to even load when the drive is plugged in, and sometimes just hangs). Recuva will show the drive but not scan it.

I can find two 'spare partitions' when scanning that are not registered as part of a drive (below) labelled as System reserve and Local Disk, I was expecting the files to be located on the Local Disk partition going off what the user stated, but the only files Recuva can find are the $BadClus and Winre.wim, plus a few tiny log files, not the documents and images I was expecting.

Is it worth me trying for these biscuits or should I concede?

 

[androbourne]

How are you attempting to recovery? Are you just plugging the SSD to another PC via USB Adaptor and trying to recover data?

The problem with SSDs is while they are all nice and fast. When they fail, they fail hard. A lot of the time when they die, they are dead and you can't get data from them.

This is due to SSDs basically running like memory. It's not broken into "sectors" like a normal HHD is, so data recovery is a lot harder (if not in most cases impossible) on a failed on an SSD.

 

[shevell]

How are you attempting to recovery? Are you just plugging the SSD to another PC via USB Adaptor and trying to recover data?

The problem with SSDs is while they are all nice and fast. When they fail, they fail hard. A lot of the time when they die, they are dead and you can't get data from them.

This is due to SSDs basically running like memory. It's not broken into "sectors" like a normal HHD is, so data recovery is a lot harder (if not in most cases impossible) on a failed on an SSD.

It's plugged into a SATA port on my MB; I knew they had a habit of going proper tits-up but I thought I'd still be able to get something off it

 

[androbourne]

Yeah thats harder to do with SSDs due to their functioning nature.

You can try plugging it to another PC via USB adaptor like I mentioned earlier. You may not be able boot into the SSD but you may still be able to access some data on it and copy it off manually. Don't get your hopes up.