Crashed Dell hard drive

L.R.S.

L.R.S.

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Last week I was trying to scan some docs from my HP Office Jet Pro to my 7 year old Dell laptop and the laptop kept freezing.  I had to unplug it and pop the battery out to get it to reset.  Doc's finally scanned and all was good.  A couple hours later I was back on the laptop and it froze up again.  Unplugged, battery out, booted up.  But this time it was different.  The laptop seemed to do a factory reset.  I went through that and it booted up.  But everything was gone.  I keep all my business files on an external drive but I had a bunch of files on the desktop and they are not there now.  Went down a YouTube rabbit hole for finding my files, undoing the update, etc.   Nothing worked.  Took it to a local PC repair shop and they found some files but not the important ones I'd like to get back.  My One Drive was set to back up some stuff but not the Desktop.  The files I need aren't life changing, but would be great if I can get them back.

One thing I noticed was for the 3 days my laptop was at the repair shop the HP printer was on, as in the screen was lit up like it was plugged into my laptop, which it wasn't.  I turned it off and back on once I got my laptop back.  Anyway the HP printer caused my hard drive to reset and delete all my sh!t?

The PC repair place installed a new hard drive that has more memory and is much faster for $200.  They gave me the old drive.  Is there anything I can do to try and get the files back?  Is there a super badazz computer repair person that would be able to handle it?  I'd be willing to throw some money at it but have no idea what the service costs.

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Question is.... When this happened "The laptop seemed to do a factory reset." did it FORMAT the drive or just rewrite the operating system Windows?

If it was a format reset you are likely F'd, if it rewrote the the OS there's a chance your personal files are hidden in the user profiles.

User profiles are stored in a few places, here's one.
image.png

maybe @JDMeister has a better answer

 
Search for hard drive data recovery. Ebay is a good place. Most if not all your data can be recovered though some places charge more than others. 

 
Damn, computer problems are pain to deal with. I feel your frustration.

 
Beware of identity theft !. Maybe change all of your personal and business bank account #'s and CC #'s to be sure. Check your bank transactions weekly and do two step identification etc.  !. 

Maybe even just get a new PC. And don't download your old crap. You will just be downloading the malware into the new PC.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Fireballsocal said:
Search for hard drive data recovery. Ebay is a good place. Most if not all your data can be recovered though some places charge more than others. 
Click to expand...
Totally agree, it’s not cheap but search online, they will get almost all your files. 

 
Turns out Doc at Funco has the cable to hook up to the hard drive and search for my files.  My son is dating his granddaughter and is hanging out with them this weekend.  Hopefully he can find something.

 
Dune-Track-N said:
Question is.... When this happened "The laptop seemed to do a factory reset." did it FORMAT the drive or just rewrite the operating system Windows?

If it was a format reset you are likely F'd, if it rewrote the the OS there's a chance your personal files are hidden in the user profiles.

User profiles are stored in a few places, here's one.
View attachment 99872

maybe @JDMeister has a better answer
Click to expand...
I did that the day it reset itself and the only user profile I could find was the one created that day.  So bummed.  I'll spend some time this weekend going through old emails looking for my docs I'd like to get back.

 
Doc has been looking into the hard drive and said I needed to get my Bitlocker key code.  Never heard of that so Google time.  Found it and it shows three keys for my laptop.  One created Oct 2017, another March 14 12:08PM (when my hard drive crashed) and another one March 19 4:43PM (when the repair shop was working on it).  Hopefully Doc can use the Oct 2017 key to recover my files.  I sent him the information.

 
L.R.S. said:
I did that the day it reset itself and the only user profile I could find was the one created that day.  So bummed.  I'll spend some time this weekend going through old emails looking for my docs I'd like to get back.
Click to expand...
Doubtful, but I've seen it before - be sure you choose the options to view "hidden items" when you're in that user folder - if you're lucky, the old profile is just hidden...click view / show / hidden files

image.png

 
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