1
I have a Dell Inspiron 7373 2-in-1 which fails to boot. The built in diagnostics which is accessed by FN-Power key says it has a failed hardrive. Most of the data is synced to the cloud - but there are a few changes which have not made it.
I can start the windows 10 advanced recovery and get to the CMD prompt where I find I am in X:. I can see the X:\USERS\Public but nothing else. Is the X: drive just a renamed boot drive where the user data is stored or is it some special partition? Is there anyway to use this X: drive to look for my Un-synched files? Is my actual user data hidden or is it on a different drive and lost?
I could not get any windows 10 OS GUI running the only boot process which I could get to work is access to the CMD prompt. The system prompts for a recovery key for many of the operations none of which work. I retrieved the key online from the windows Live acccount.
X is the current recovery OS. – Moab – 2018-06-24T12:14:51.957
You are best to remove the hard drive to perform data recovery. – Moab – 2018-06-24T12:15:54.033
If the hard drive has suffered physical failure then the act of even powering on the drive may further damage the data stored on it and/or your ability to access it. Every moment that the drive spends running the odds of getting your data back is reduced. Data recovery is a very delicate activity and is always a race against the clock. So the first thing is to always stop accessing the drive till you know exactly what you need to do to get the data back. And the windows recovery environment is not an appropriate tool for such a task. – Cliff Armstrong – 2018-06-24T14:42:00.353
As an addendum... that you can't also see a C: drive from the recovery environment indicates that the windows filesystem on the disk could not be mounted. There are a number of possible causes... but the details of what I would suggest you do next extend well beyond the limits of the question you have asked. – Cliff Armstrong – 2018-06-24T14:47:05.377