[SOLVED] Urgent help Unallocated SSD problem

[sutho]

Hi I turned on my computer this morning and one of my SSD's was unallocated. It is a drive that I have photos stored on and although everything is backed up I am fearful to format the drive. The disk management scans the drive as healthy and no errors but to allocate a letter it wants to format it. If I do this I am worried I will lose the data on it.

While most of the data is backed up on another drive and I can get it back almost instantly I am worried about some Adobe Lightroom files. The program was installed on that drive and my latest work of a few hundred old colour slides I had recently scanned was on that drive and the data about it is in the folder on that drive. Without that I will have to start all that work again which is precious time.

I can find a data recovery program but when I do the scans the file names and folders do not represent what they originally were. Is this a problem?

Are there any solutions of the best recommended data recovery software that could prove useful or other steps worth considering before formatting the drive.

 

[Grobe]

There is one, slightly dangerous* approach.

You may boot into an Linux ISO image, and from there use the ntfsfix command.

* Dangerous because you kind of need to know the naming rules for storage devices in Linux - or you may do damage to healthy partitions instead.

 

[sutho]

Thanks for that and it is probably above my level of ability at this stage....

I have managed to find a partition wizard and can see the files. If I can extract the files I need then I will just reformat the drive and load everything back on it. It will set me back a little but not as much as losing all the work.

 

[sutho]

I will just post an update where I am up to. After waking up this morning I discovered one of my SSD's was not recognised in the computer. I could not open my photos and other documents folder. In disk management it was there but had lost its allocation which was D drive. I attempted to reallocate the drive letter but it wanted to format the drive. This I did not want. Fortunately for me I still had the exact clone of my data backed up on my previous HDD so I could plug that in and use it as if nothing had happened. However one problem existed was that my recent data from a major scanning project of colour slides was all lost. This was hours of work to days of work. After a few searches I was able to use Mini Tool Data Recovery 8. 8 to extract the necessary files I needed which were in its free limit before licence required.

It has now taken up to 6 hours and I have finally reformatted the SSD and am in the process of transferring all the data to it again.

When I use the SSD the old HDD is backed up but not plugged in. This ensures I have a backup in the event of a failure.

I am just wondering if there is anything I could have done to prevent this happening or stop it happening again? Could this by a random cyber attack from malware or anything that my antivirus software did not detect (Norton). Although I keep backups the point is it is time consuming. Taking 6 hours and more out of my day I cannot get back is not acceptable if it can be avoided.

I welcome any suggestions.

I copied the Lightroom data files and am waiting to see once the data transfers back if I was successful with that work. At the very least I have my scans so all is not lost.

 

[Grobe]

I am just wondering if there is anything I could have done to prevent this happening or stop it happening again?

There is not enough information to draw any conclusion.

What you could do is to provide all S.M.A.R.T data for the ssd. Maybe that can reveal if there is a broblem to the device itself.

 

[popatim]

Thanks for that and it is probably above my level of ability at this stage....

I have managed to find a partition wizard and can see the files. If I can extract the files I need then I will just reformat the drive and load everything back on it. It will set me back a little but not as much as losing all the work.

i thought you said it was all backed up. If that was true then you've eliminated the 'need' to recover the data.
My data is backed up and I could care less if a drive dies in my pc, it just means i get to put in a bigger, better, faster one in

As for preventing it, you cannot. Drives die all the time, even new ones, and usually without any warning.
You always have to plan for your drive completely dying and becoming unrecoverable in the next 5 minutes. It's happened to many of us which is why we urge people to have a good backup system in place for any important data.

 

[sutho]

i thought you said it was all backed up. If that was true then you've eliminated the 'need' to recover the data.
My data is backed up and I could care less if a drive dies in my pc, it just means i get to put in a bigger, better, faster one in

As for preventing it, you cannot. Drives die all the time, even new ones, and usually without any warning.
You always have to plan for your drive completely dying and becoming unrecoverable in the next 5 minutes. It's happened to many of us which is why we urge people to have a good backup system in place for any important data.

Thanks, it was mostly backed up. There were a few .prproj files from video editing of projects I had saved that I did not remember to back up in the last two months. Then there was the photos I was working on from the week prior.

I will definitely aim to have more regular backup. I usually backup with online storage as well as a external hard drive I keep unplugged and locked away. Then I also have most data on the laptop as well and a few other places. So generally losing a hard drive is not too much of an issue unless of course it involves work that was not backed up in the last 24 hours to week.

 

[popatim]

Glad you had already worked on having backups!