Two days ago, my SSD stopped showing up on my computer (it doesn’t show up in file explorer, disk mgt., device mgt., bios). There was little warning of drive failure; i was downloading a new game to it that morning (had to restart a failed download twice, but the third time succeeded). It’s been humming along without issue for a couple of years now. There are some personal projects, photos, maybe game saves i’d like to retrieve if possible. Any ideas or tips would be helpful?
So far i’ve tried:
- restarting
- scanning with device mgr, disk mgr, in the bios
- power cycling the drive with the sata unplugged
- switching the sata cable to another port (no show)
- switching out the drive for a blank drive(no show as well)
next steps are to try cloning the drive with a 2 bay docking station
spec info:
- drive: 1 TB western digital SA510, working as the secondary drive.
- OS: Windows 10
Edit: thanks for the advice. It looks like this is out of my range of abilities to recover so I’m looking to a professional service now. Let me know of a good data recovery service in the greater Vancouver area of you know of one.
i just tried swapping the power and sata cables between the good and bad drives and was able to boot up from the good drive, but no bad drive. so the cables are good
Now that you’ve established that the cables are good you can boot from a live usb plugged into one of the usb ports and with the questionable drive plugged into the known good port and cable. If the drive still doesn’t show up in whatever partition editor the live distro has then you’re probably boned.
Ya, it’s definitely out of my ability. I’m going to start getting quotes for data recovery services around me.
It’s not that hard. If you are comfortable enough to muck about inside your computer with SATA cables and ports, I would bet money you can handle this.
I’m gonna be short here because I don’t have the time to go into more detail; maybe someome else can go into more detail if you need it.
Find a USB drive you don’t mind formatting (losing all data on the drive), at least 8gb.
Download Ventoy. Extract it, run the .exe and select your USB drive. It will erase everything and install Ventoy onto that drive.
Download a live boot Linux distro. Fedora or Ubuntu are both perfectly fine for this, and simple. You should be downloading an .iso file. Place that file onto the Ventoy USB.
Shut down your PC. Unplug the good SSD. Plug the bad SSD into the mobo using the cable and port you know are good.
Ensuring that the Ventoy USB is still plugged into your PC, turn it on. Get into BIOS. Change your boot order so that the Ventoy USB is first.
Should boot into Ventoy. Select the .iso you put on there. It will handle booting up from that file. If there’s any more options, just choose the default. Booting might take much longer than you’re used to since it’s from a USB stick.
You should now be using that OS, booted live from your USB drive. Does the SSD appear in the file browser? Alternatively you can follow that OS’ installation prompt (probably came up automatically when it reached the desktop) until the choose an installation step, does the SSD show up? Do NOT actually install the OS onto that drive, that will erase data.
What is the point of this? Is accessing a drive different in Linux somehow?
The point is to confirm if the drive is dead, or if it’s some sort of software issue.
I think it’s beyond a software fix at this point. I haven’t had a flicker of life from the drive after switching power/sata cables, a usb drive enclosure and a hdd docking station (i’ve confirmed the external devices work with a different drive). I’m all for booting to linux, but the bios doesn’t report that anything is connected when going through the sata ports.
Most likely, but it doesn’t hurt to check.