Wrightbuzz: Drive recovery 2024 Home Search

What do you do when an old computer will not start? At first you panic, then you try to fix it. Here are some screen shots of the drive recovery effort.

Walked into the office to see this message on the monitor. Choose an option... Choose an option
Continuing to Windows did not work, time to troubleshoot. Troubleshoot
Preparing automatic repair... not a comforting feeling. Preparing
System restore did not complete. System restore
Your device ran into a problem... Problem
Dell trying to diagnose the problem. Diagnosing
Automatic repair couldn't repair the PC. Automatic repair
Low level test returned code stating hard drive was not working! Mild panic attack. Hard drive issue

At this point wasn't sure what to do. The hard drive was not responding. Files were backed up to the cloud but we needed somewhere to restore them. Considered buying a new hard drive but it didn't make sense to invest more money in a 2017 computer.

Then I remembered getting an email from Gibson Research last month about the latest version of Spinrite, a program designed to analyze hard drives at a low-level. Had not used the program in years but had a valid license. Downloaded the latest version and configured a USB boot disk.

Figured out how to get the Dell to boot from the USB drive. The Spinrite interface is basic text, but easy to follow.

Spinrite analyzing hard drive. (After 47 minutes.) Spinrite
Took a little video to show Spinrite in action.
Spinrite analysis complete! (Took 4 hours, 11 minutes.) Complete
Two unrecovered sectors. Had hoped the program would show recovered data. Results

Restarted the computer. Was stunned to see the Windows login page appear! Somehow the low-level activity had fixed the hard drive problem. This was great news. It allowed us to copy files from the C: drive to an external drive to restore to a new computer. We could have accessed backup files from the cloud but that would have taken much longer.

Bought a new PC to replace the old one. Configuring the new PC presented some challenges but at least the backed up files were available to load.

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