No Boot Device - 1TB Drive - Not a crash...

DeMajrea

Estimable
Aug 25, 2015
1
0
4,510
Hello all,
A few months back I got hit with the perfect data nightmare. Long story short - my backups are gone and the only copy of things I want are on a 1TB sata HDD. It was below 10% free space, my screen on the laptop went out - so instead of connecting to a monitor I pulled the drive and tried to use it as a portable on other system. That whacked the boot drive. I panicked and tried returning it to it's original machine - which did read the drive as being there but wouldn't load windows. I found an option in the Bios to do a "Hard Drive Recovery" - that started to work - gave the windows load screen and continued, but locked up with a black screen and only the mouse cursor on the display. From that point the laptop wasn't showing that the drive was even there and now gives "No Boot Device Detected" error. Using another machine I found that the drive functional, but that the 1TB partition has been undone - and a 500MB drive is what it showed itself as. I'm having a hell of a time getting my new machine to even see the drive - so data recovery has been at a stand still - can't scan what it can't see... I have a new machine and a 2TB portable drive to transfer anything I can reach... ideas?????
 

D_Know_WD

Estimable
Hi there DeMajrea,

Is the drive recognized by BIOS?
How does the drive appear under Disk Management when attached to another system? In case it is recognized, but has damaged partitions, file system, etc., I would advise you to use some data recovery software and save all the recovered data on the other HDD.
In case you don't want to attach the HDD to another system, you can just use some data recovery tool for DOS mode.

Thread on data recovery: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD