Data recovery advice

[jmak]

Normally my answer is pretty strongly "if you don't have a backup, it's gone". However, we have a visitor recently arrived from Ukraine who has a very good reason for being unable to access any backups they might have had, so I'm not even going to mention that; I'll just do my best to help.

 

It's a Windows 11 laptop which won't boot and none of the repair my computer, reset my computer and keep data options work.

 

I can boot into the Windows troubleshoot menu and open command prompt. I've then run notepad.exe and can access the file structure through that.

 

If I copy those files to an external drive, will they be accessible if I reinstall Windows and copy them back?

 

Thanks

[Koldov]

If you can copy them to an external drive, you can verify their integrity on another computer and if you can access them, you have them as a back-up copy... job done, no?

[JATSO]

Clone the drive out of windows and work on that, that's if it clones.

Then use recovery software to try and obtain the files from the clone.

[mavhc]

Boot from any of the 1000 recovery OSes on usb and copy the files off, unless they're encrypted it's fine, and you'll be able to tell that because they won't load/be garbage when they load

[CHiLL]

If you can't boot the OS, my first thought would be to connect the drive to another PC and see if you can access the files that way.

 

When it comes to restoring Windows and copying files back, I wouldn't risk just copying all the files from the source drive and copying them back when Windows is reinstalled, I'd only do data folders, such as Documents, Pictures, etc (and maybe AppData). Other applications would need resinstalling manually.

[psydii]

My first thought here is that it might be a failed Optane drive? These are oddly structured and you need to follow slightly different steps to recover than for more traditional HDD/SDDs

[Sonic007]

Can you not take the drive out and put it into a USB caddy and just hook it up to a PC.

[jmak]

Can you not take the drive out and put it into a USB caddy and just hook it up to a PC.

That's what I ended up doing last night. I seen to have working copies of the important files so I'm ready to put a clean install of Windows on now.

 

I felt that having got into cmd in Windows recovery I ought to have been able to copy data from there without talking the laptop apart. Stick to what I know I guess is the lesson.