I recently had an issue with Windows 10 freezing on the load screen while booting.
After installing and booting into Ubuntu, I found out that my second hard drive was not accessible. This is my main storage but separate from the drive that windows is installed on.
As soon as I unhooked the hard drive windows started right up. So obviously there's a big problem with the hard drive.
The HDD is a Western Digital Blue 1TB. It's just over two years old.
I tried booting into windows and then hooking up the hard drive but windows would not see it, even after scanning.
I had to order a new hard drive anyway so I ordered a usb to SATA adapter. When I plug it in, windows now sees the drive. However, as soon as I attempt to open a file explorer window the computer freezes up. It doesn't totally freeze up. I can move the cursor and even open task manager but not much else. If I pull out the usb connecting the hard drive the computer comes right back to life. It's like it's trying to read something but unable to.
I downloaded a couple of free trials of recovery programs to see if they would do anything (Recuva and KrollOntrack) Basically the same thing happened with them. I could plug the hard drive in and start up the recover program but as soon as I hit scan everything froze up and the recover program crashed.
The hard drive spins up when power is applied and there is no clicking or other outward signs of physical damage.
So, main question - Is there any hope (outside of prohibitively expensive recovery services) of getting my data back?
Any ideas for further troubleshooting I could try?
Normally I'm good about backing everything up but I had a large amount of photos on this hard drive from a recent trip that I hadn't gotten around to copying over to other drives yet. Shame on me.
Thanks for any help or ideas!
Edited by hamluis, 08 December 2017 - 03:53 PM.
Moved from Internal Hardware to Backup/Imaging/Disk Mgmt - Hamluis.