Dead HDD's???

[The_Creamster_1992]

So for starters more from a perspective pov before someone says 'blah blah blah'; i know i need a new PC, i needed a new one 4yrs ago let alone now and can't buy an full new one or sufficient new replacement parts. I just want a straight-ish answer/diagnosis of what's wrong with my HDD's.

 

About 3 weeks ago one morning my PC wouldn't start; just kept bios looping, after a few days of self diagnosis combined with help from someone else i came to the conclusion that i had a dead OS drive(either the drive itself or the OS boot loader/sector). So i was stuck on mobile for a week until someone sent me a replacement drive in the form of a 500GB Sata SSD of which i'm extremely grateful for, but after installing Win10 new again via USB the 4TB(4-6yrs old??) wasn't showing up in file explorer. During bios/boot a supplementary screen showed up listing the 1TB OS HDD and the 4TB Storage HDD as "unconfigured". A few more hours of mind-numbing googling later and i came out none the wiser but still imparted with the hint of knowledge that i may be able to recover the files.

 

The data on the 1TB drive i don't really care for as it's had Win10 re-installed on it 2 times now so what application save files on it i've transferred over to the 4TB Storage drive. The scary thing is everything of mine is on that 4TB Storage drive, literally everything including the copies of these said files among everything else including personal files. So i'm in quite the pickle here with no way out and any kind of helpful answer would be greatly appreciated; also i can't really get a screenshot of some things due to the mobile device i use being equally stupid and not being able to transfer data to/from it. I just hope i've explained things well enough to convey what i've done/searched for; if there's anything i've not detailed enough let me know and i'll fill things in otherwise as you make me aware of them:

 

What other solutions can i try right now that i haven't done already and what are the chances of me getting my data back??

(i live in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in-case there are good reasonably, priced solutions and my personal circumstances change for the better allowing me to pay for said fixes)

[MistahHaskins]

There are softwares that will recover data, now the more important question to ask is what one will you use to try and recover the data.

 

Look around, I would operate like normal, and try and use these softwares. Only issue you might come across is that IF the drive is completely dead, any software you do decide to use wouldn't be able to scan any sectors of the drive rendering anything on the drive unrecoverable. Since it did come up, even though recognized as unconfigured, there still is the off chance the drive has lost the sector in which the windows install was corrupted and that would've been your only issue.

 

 

[mariushm]

It may be a simple thing as going in Disk Management to ACTIVATE the drives. They may be detected but not enabled or initialized for some reasons  so the drive letters won't show up.

If it's an actual data loss, the data would still be there on the platters, and typically a file system like NTFS has the primary area where it stores information about files and folders but also a backup of that information in another area and it also has some "transaction logs" (helpful in case of power loss or something, to get back to a healthy state).

Anyway the point is recovery software would be able to scan the surface of the drives and find the location where the partition information and if lucky the file system information is and may be able to recover all your files.

Others can suggest the right tool for such operations ... personally I've used O&O products  so maybe try O&O DiskRecovery ... other brands I'm aware of is Acronis Disk Director (some guide here: https://www.acronis.com/en-us/articles/partition-recovery/  )  , EaseUS Partition Master with some guide here : https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/partition-recovery.html

 

[The_Creamster_1992]

The one problem is the drives partitions aren't showing up in Disk Management... i haven't tried data recovery programs yet but i get the feeling they would need to be able to see the drives partitions in Windows themselves as available partitions to even attempt data recovery am i right when thinking that??? I'll try some of them anyway and update this reply with my findings.

[Blue4130]

4 hours ago, The_Creamster_1992 said:

The one problem is the drives partitions aren't showing up in Disk Management... i haven't tried data recovery programs yet but i get the feeling they would need to be able to see the drives partitions in Windows themselves as available partitions to even attempt data recovery am i right when thinking that??? I'll try some of them anyway and update this reply with my findings.

No, as long as the disk shows up, the recovery software should be able to work. It should be able to rebuild partitions. 

[The_Creamster_1992]

18 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

No, as long as the disk shows up, the recovery software should be able to work. It should be able to rebuild partitions. 

So both O&O and Acronis aren't even recognising any partitions on the 4TB(the 1TB isn't powered or sata connected though it's still in my case for storage purposes). Does that mean both drives are truly dead and/or require professional drive stripdown data recovery? This is what i was internally worrying about the most but sure didn't hope it was and it seems to be the case with my drives...

 

Any more last ditch potential solutions that aren't going to cost me $$ ?? and again thanks to those who've responded it's been greatly appreciated.