I need help with data recovery

[wassup]

I had an NVME ssd that served as my C: drive. For a while, I was getting a lot of blue screens, until one day the drive simply stopped working completely. When I switched to a new C: drive, I never got those BSOD again, meaning that either the drive or the port is damaged. The problem is that I can no longer access any of the data in that ssd, as Windows tells me that I need to format the disk to open it. I tried running chkdsk, but it said this: "The type of the file system is NTFS. The first NTFS boot sector is unreadable or corrupt. Reading second NTFS boot sector instead. Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted." Unfortunately, my motherboard has no other NVME port for me to test whether the ssd can be read in another port.

[Mumintroll]

There are USB thingamojings you can put the drive in and connect to the pc to try with, but it's no guarantee it would detect the drive especially if it's going bad.

[kokosnh]

It’s possible that it is just a partition table corruption.

do not perform any write operation on that Ssd,  do not format, do not chkdsk ( disable trim for it if you can )

you can try to run some liveCD Linux distro, like Ubuntu and see if it can see the files, if it can, just copy it to other drive.

you should also run crystaldiskinfo and post here a screen from it of that Ssd, for us to see if there’s anything wrong with it from smart data. 

[TudorFinalBosz]

You need software that reads a drive as raw data, not partitions. Which can recover files based on headers, but if they are contiguous. I've used something like that once, but don't remember what it was called.

Since it can't find the partition table, there's no way to recover fragmented files.

You could try a tool that rebuilds the drive headers. But that would make the old structure gone.

I don't even understand how could an SSD have such errors, I thought when they go bad, they become read-only. Was there some software intervention on the drive? Or sudden power cut while it was writing?

[TudorFinalBosz]

Probably best solution would be to use disk cloning software, to make sure you recover as much as possible, but it will be just raw data. A soup of characters that maybe later could be made sense of by looking for file headers.

 

But if no software can read it even as raw data, then maybe the drive is electronically damaged.

[Mumintroll]

I haven't tried it myself, but maybe DiskGenius could repair partition tables and such things?

It's a free app but I've only used it for OS migration, haven't had any usage for its other functions.

@kokosnh @TudorFinalBosz

[DoranVuTye]

On 9/17/2025 at 7:02 PM, TudorFinalBosz said:

Probably best solution would be to use disk cloning software, to make sure you recover as much as possible, but it will be just raw data. A soup of characters that maybe later could be made sense of by looking for file headers.

 

But if no software can read it even as raw data, then maybe the drive is electronically damaged.

I would think that even with raw data, there'd likely be a layer of encryption on the controller firmware level preventing easy translation back to usable data.

Usually when the drive fails to this degree, error correction has been overwhelmed to the point that enough bits have been corrupted that it can't recover enough to get the user's data.