I have a HP laptop with windows 10 on it's hard disk. I clicked on a recently obtained file then:  # windows explorer got stuck  # tried opening task manager to kill windows explorer ; blue screen with qr code appears with message "your pc ran into an error..."  # laptop restarts with BIOS interface saying it can't find Bootable device  # pressed f2 from the displayed options to do a hard drive test ; no hard drive detected.  # removed battery and put it back after pressing the power button.  # a BIOS interface with CMOS battery reset prompt appeared ; PC went on and off.  # Restarts ; OS boots up and gets stuck at user sign in  # shuts down itself and permanently gets all looped between the BIOS interface saying it can't find Bootable device and me pressing the power button.  Here's what I tried:  # googling the problem; learnt the file I clicked on must have had a Trojan and probably deleted OS files even though I had an anti virus that kept mute as it occured.   # opened the device and plugged the hard disk to another machine via a hard drive case adaptor.  # saw my files but could not access my User folder due to permissions. I googled again ; changed  permission properties of the folder to SYSTEM but it failed after a while.  # tried a couple of times but failed ; the last trial had the other machine dieing due to low power  # I suppose the operation couldn't finish ; I got another machine again : this time only the recovery partition of the drive was accessible, the main partition only had its icon displayed with no usage/size tile next to it.  # clicked on it no response but a green loading bar at the top of the file explorer which took to long each time with a prompt suggesting I should format the drive.  # connected the hard disk via the adaptor to my PC externally(via its USB) ; goes on an off while trying to boot from the hard disk.  # Suddenly "fixing drive" appears automatically under the HP boot up icon ; PC looses power upon hard disk repair. battery fell off.  Connected the drive back. Now its not being detected at all, it's light doesn't blink at all but it shows up also it doesn't spin/make any vibrations. I tried connecting it to other machines the sound windows makes when a usb device is connected doesn't even come up. It's as if nothing is connected but the hard drive is on.  Please How do I fix this, I don't want to loose my data.
746
What steps can I take to try to recover lost or inaccessible data from any storage device?  Answers:   This applies to any computer storage device, e.g. internal/external hard drives, USB sticks, flash memory. The most important thing is to STOP using it, any type of I/O can ruin your chances of a recovery.     We have separate questions covering common problems with USB flash drives in greater detail:
110549
OK, please, following you have an updated one step ahead question regarding my first question post on the title.  The question now is, how possibly get some info or tracing/debug on, which possible reason is leading to this error referring to SYSPREP.  In the net I found several posts for this, and the following link do have quite exact instructions what to look at and try, and I have also been following most of them, except maybe one-two, which I now will still follow on a next Upgrade trial in few hours.  ->   Here you have a summary of the background info for this case:   Windows 10 Anniversary Upgrade is stuck at ab. 32% done, in a minute after the second (despite named as FIRST_BOOT) restart at 30%, during the actual final update process phase, with blank grey display and power-on after an emergency power-off in a quarter or so, the Upgrade trial will got reversed and following error splash window will pop-up:     We couldn't install Windows 10      We've set your PC back to the way it was just before you started installing Windows 10.      0xC1900101 - 0x30018    The installation failed in the FIRST_BOOT phase with an error during SYSPREP operation  the laptop is some 7yrs old with dual-core AMD 1.9GHz 32-bit, memory 3GB, and has been working great with Windows 10 Pro (updated from 8.1) since 9 months I know there is outdatings with e.g. display driver, now run with the basic MS one, and Wi-Fi driver etc., but several of the risky devices and also software have been disabled during the Upgrade trials   I hope someone could help me some step ahead on this.
52398
I am trying to recover data from a bad Seagate 1TB hard drive in a 2010 iMac. One day the iMac wouldn't boot (stuck at gray screen on startup). I removed the hard drive from the iMac and connected it to a MacBook using a 3.5" HDD to USB adapter. The hard drive wouldn't mount but it did display in Disk Utility that that there were 2 partitions on the disk. I tried to run Disk Warrior and it showed thousands of errors but still wouldn't mount. At this time the hard drive only show one partition in Disk Utility. Next I tried putting the hard drive in a desktop PC and running Spin Rite - which then gave me several division overflow errors (even with running Spin Rite with a newer version of DOS). The SMART status on the drive reports that the drive has had failures and HD Tune referenced the drive had once hit 59 degrees celsius. Disk Utility gives me the following message when running a pair: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.  Overall, the hard drive spins up and sounds OK - there are no clicking noises but the hard drive won't mount and displays as a light gray "Macintosh HD" in disk utility. Any tips or advice on how to recover data on this drive would be greatly appreciated! Are there any other tools I can try before calling it quits on this drive?
109943
Q1: Can forcibly powering off a PC without using the built-in shutdown/reboot functions, cause a HDD to accumulate bad sectors? Whether it be the result of BSODs, lockups, crashes, etc.   Q2: If so, are these bad sectors repairable? I know an OS typically relocate bad sectors to other areas of the drive, but once a drive accumulates too many it just dies.   I have read up and saw things about 'soft' and 'hard' bad sectors. One caused by software and the other being actual physical damage. The reason I am asking this is because I have had several HDDs die on me in the past year, far before their estimated lifespan, and one thing they all had in common was that I had forcibly powered off my PC a lot.
33724
My laptop got broken (by what it seems the graphics card burned) and it is so old that it is not worth fixing it.   I took the harddrive from it and tried to use it as external hard drive with other computer, however I cannot access all the data, ie anything that is inside my user folder (it shows it to be empty). Couldn't find anything to solve it.
44050
I was trying to create a dual boot of Windows 8 and Ubuntu. I successfully installed Ubuntu on the hard disk but it wasn't able to boot so I went through boot-repair which said that I should put a certain file as EFI. I did that, restarted and only Acer logo appeared with nothing else. F2 didn't work, I couldn't get to BIOS any other way.  What I have tried:   Reseat the RAM Plug-in, plug-out hard drive Trying to plug only a bootable flash drive Trying to boot from CD Downloaded BIOS update from the acer website, but it only has a version from within Windows (which I can't access). Shorted JCMOS1 jumper for 20 seconds after which the ACER logo dissapeared and insted:   A black screen appears after I press the power key for about 5 seconds and then only a message "Press  to enter Setup." appears If I hold Fn+Esc and then power up, system info appears (Insyde H2O EFI 3.7, Copyright... System BIOS version: v2.13, Processor type etc) and the "Press  to enter Setup." on the bottom On pressing F2 the message "Press  to enter Setup." dissapears but nothing happens    Any other ideas are very welcome!  Thanks!
67006
I have an HP 6730b laptop with a BIOS password and Windows XP password. I do not need any of the content on the disk, I would just like to be able to reset everything and start again from scratch.  Is there any way to achieve this?  Edit: It appears that HP Credential Manager has been used to password the BIOS. This could be why none of the methods I have tried are working.
26222
My laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate (non OEM) died on me today and it has tonnes of stuff on it - my projects, Visual Studio and office installations, etc. etc.  I am getting a new laptop from somewhere and was wondering if I could just unplug the hard disk from my original (dead) machine and plug it into the new one.  I remember trying this once with Windows Xp (on a desktop) and the OS crashed on boot and I had to reinstall everything again.  I have read about  but by the looks of it, it can be used only when the host computer is alive and kicking -- which mine isn't.  My old laptop was a Compaq Pressario v3000 (3 years old) on an AMD and the new one is going to be a new dual core Intel HP laptop.  Any ideas?  Thanks!
41657
This morning I went to turn on a family member's laptop to find the SMART message displaying that the laptop's hard disk is close to failure and needs replacing.   The laptop is around 2 years old now and I have now backed everything up just in case of this 'imminent' failure.   I ran the HDTune programme to test the amount of damaged blocks there are in the hard disk.  This resulted in 24/2500 blocks (1%)  To me, (someone who doesn't know a great deal about computer hardware) this doesn't seem like a very large amount and I am not entirely sure where to go from here.   Shall I just suggest to immediately buy a new hard drive for the laptop as this one will just keep on deteriorating?  Or, as everything is now backed up, keep on using the laptop until the inevitable happens which could be; days, weeks or months, as this laptop isn't really used for anything majorly important?  Thanks in advance,  JD
63069
I was trying to put the  onto a thumb drive, when I was asked if I was OK with wiping it (I said yes I as it was blank).  I had to sleep my computer during the wiping, and now I can't do anything with my dive.  When I put it into my computer:    When I click format disk:    In short, the disk never reformats (I get an error message letting me know that Windows was unable to format the drive).  Whats going on, and how do I fix it?
84568
For the past couple weeks, my PC has started having an issue where it randomly reboots. These reboots have happen 1-2 times a day, and have so far always been when I am away from it.  There isn't any discernible patterns I've seen from the reboot timestamps. I've thought it might be related to the power supply going bad, but it is fairly new. Also the fact that it is not rebooting under load, but rather while Idle, seems like it shouldn't be a PSU problem?  I also upgraded to Windows 10 the other day, expecting that to possibly affect/fix the issue, but it still happens regardless.  Here are the two events always generated by the reboot -        Is there any way to further debug/troubleshoot what exactly is causing the reboots?
77489
I have an iMac 2008/2009 issue and recently the computer would not boot and I would get a flashing question mark. Ran through all the usual steps, try boot in safe mode, flash RAM,  try single user for fdisk, put in OS disk and boot from CD, etc... No dice.   Replaced the hard drive and put the OS disc in the system, press and hold option. (holding C didn't work) I can see the OS disk but when I click on it the system will act like it is going to run and then freeze. The best I got was the OS X disc that changed the screen to dark grey and told be the system had to restart.  Purchased a usb mount for an external hard drive. Was able to mount the old hard drive to a laptop and run disk utility. Everything checked out.  At this point I am pretty sure it isn't the hard drive.   Any other hard ware items this can point too? My iMAC can also "see" the hard drive (and the recovery partition) when connected via the USB and I hold "option" on start up. But it crashes when trying to boot from either.  I am going to take out and re-install the RAM for giggles but I am not sure what else to do.   Ideas are welcome.
89967
I got a new laptop; it came with an existing Windows installation, but I wanted to migrate my current backup to the new machine. I dd-ed the new machine's partitions to an external drive:  /dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme0n1p2 /dev/nvme0n1p3 /dev/nvme0n1p4   and afterwards move my current partitions to the new machine. What followed was a medium-sized nightmare. The new machine would boot, but the wireless network drivers were not recognized and later found out (to the best of my knowledge) they couldn't be installed. I tried:   booting from the console and running:  sfc /scannow chkdsk C: /f /r /x   both seemed to have completed successfully, but now the machine would get stuck in a startup repair loop. I tried resetting the machine (whilst keeping my files), but this failed halfway through. now the machine's still stuck in the loop and decided to try and repair it externally using a bootable Windows&nbsp;10 . It's likely that I'll need the new machine's Windows&nbsp;10 key. I'm not sure if it's stored in the BIOS (it came with Windows&nbsp;10  preinstalled) or somewhere on the partitions.   How can I get the key from the partitions (if it's there at all) while booting from a Linux image?
16492
A friend of mine recently gave me a laptop that wasn't booting past the Windows screen. I replaced the hard drive with a new one and put the old hard drive in my comp. to try and recover the data.  Windows 7 didn't recognise the main OS partition indicating some filesystem corruption (disk manager showed it as a RAW drive instead of NTFS). Incidentally, the hard drive has two other partitions: the small 100 MB one was fine in Windows and the 10 GB Recovery partition was fine after Windows ran a disk check).  Then I booted up with a Linux live CD (Slax) and the filesystem was recognised fine. However, when trying to copy files, many files would cause errors each one holding up the copy process by about a minute. I'm copying about 120 GB of data with thousands of bad files so this means it takes forever to copy.  There are big files (videos and photos) and small files (documents).  What I need is a way to copy files from a dying HD so:   if a file is bad, it fails silently (not interactively) it fails quickly (&lt; 1 seconds ideally) it optionally deletes the bad file from the destination (not necessary)   so that the process can be done overnight.  Do you know a live CD where copy behaves like that or parameters to cp I can use or the settings for ddrescue I need to use or some other method to do this (I'm a linux noob)?  Alternatively, do you know a way to mount a broken filesystem in Windows (it looks like there are errors in important locations so Windows doesn't recognise it as NTFS). Then I can try xcopy.
66895
I was at school SSHing to my homebox. All of a sudden, my connection was closed. Attempting to reconnect failed. When I returned home, I discovered that my computer was off.  Nobody was at my house and I am sure that I did not have a power outage.  How can I figure out how or why my computer shut off? Is there some log in /var/log that could point me in the right direction? Should there be a core dump somewhere that I should find? If so, how do I use core dumps?
108950
I have a Dell Latitude D410.  Running Windows XP.   I am receiving the STOP: 0x000000ED (0X899CF030,0XC0000185,0X00000000,0X00000000) blue screen.  Initially, I tried everything specified with the Microsoft KB articles. At this time, I was able to boot into the general safemode. I pulled the hard drive and was able to run chkdsk on it – it noted that it had fixed some errors, but I was still unable to boot.    I put a brand new hard drive into the laptop.  Windows XP installation worked up until the reboot, at which time the exact same error message came back up.  What I have tried (all since the new hard drive was installed):   chkdsk /R All suggested solutions in Microsoft KB articles Reseating RAM Opened laptop, reseated all connectors, looked for signs of damage (saw none) Reset BIOS options to default Ran the basic Dell diagnostics Ran MEMTEST86+ V4.10 for 15 passes (overnight).  0 Errors   I have looked at the current entry:  - I am currently in the process of downloading the Ultimate Boot CD to use as a test, but I am not holding out a lot of hope as I really doubt this brand new hard drive is bad.  Can anyone think of other areas I am missing?
14116
Last night my 500 GB Seagate hard drive was fine but this morning it suddenly started crashing, somehow I made it work after a chkdsk but 2 partitions show space is full now but it wasn't when the drive was fine. The 3rd partition one is also acting weird.   Whenever I try to open any drive, Windows asks to format it. My drive is still under warranty but I don't want to lose any data. How can I recover data from this crashed/crashing hard drive?   my OS is: windows xp sp3 Processor: Inter Pentium 4 3.0 GHz 1 GB RAM Already have 2 other hard drives  1 - 320 GB - OS drive - seagate 2 - 1 TB - western digital   UPDATE 1: when using Test Disk: it's showing some read errors  UPDATE 2: Now all the partitions are not showing up in my computer, but can see the hard drive in hardware manager, now what to do ?  Here are some screenshots: