SSD recovery

[Dave Sherman]

My laptop recently had a snafu (see here https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/uh-oh-computer-problems-bios-and-drive.370092/), and I was able to get the laptop 100% running again with a new SSD. Silly me did not have recent backup, but after buying a USB-to-M.2 adapter, I found the old drive is not dead. Something goofed up the partition table, and some Googling pointed me to DiskGenius, which was able to read the drive once I got my Bitlocker key. The good news is, I can see most of the files on the drive. The bad news is, the c:\users directory appears empty, which is where I have some things I'd like to recover.

Now here's the thing, I was looking at other directories, and c:\users, c:\windows, and c:\program files all appear empty. I'm wondering if that's more of a Bitlocker/Microsoft security feature that's making them inaccessible. Anyone have any ideas? The other option might be to see if I can fix the partition table so the drive is visible without having to use DiskGenius, put it back in the computer and see if it will boot. The hardware diagnostics on the drive are not finding any problems.

 

[Pew]

I've never come across this issue personally so what I would do is run WinDirStat to see if those 3 directories could be hidden somewhere (for whatever reason, who knows.) It's actually a program used to show the sizes of drives and folders but because the users, windows, and program files tend to be the largest sized folders, WinDirStat would make it super obvious.

Here's a screenshot of what I mean:

So if you don't see users/program files/windows in this view but you see a different folder that's unnaturally sized, you can check there.

EDIT: I've also never come across BitLocker only encrypting certain folders after you have unlocked it with the key and it certainly wouldn't hide them.

 

[racer12306]

I just went through this with a couple hard drives. I did not have any Bitlocker complications to address, so hopefully this works for you as well.

How to access old user folder? - Microsoft Q&A

I recently had an issue which caused me to have to reinstall windows onto a different drive, and now that I've got that done, I'm trying to copy over my old files to the new drive. Problem: I can't access my old user folder. Now, I'm no stranger to…

learn.microsoft.com

Hi. Thank you for your question and reaching out. I’d be more than happy to help you with your query

You can follow these steps to access the old user folder:

Choose "Properties" from the drop-down list.
Click the "Security" tab in the Property box.
Click the "Advanced" option to the right of the table.
Choose the "Change" button next to the Owner.
Click the "Advanced" option to open the "Choose User or Group" dialog.
Click the "Find Now" button.
. Click OK after selecting a user name.
8 Choose OK.

Uncheck the "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" box. Then click the Apply button.
If the Windows Security dialog appears, click OK.
If you followed the procedures above, you should be able to access your folder now.

Important step that they left out..... reboot.

Then when you try to access the user folder it should say you need administrator access and then allow you to grant administrator access. I set the user as my username, not as the administrator. It didn't work when I set it as admin, but I may not have reboot after that change and it was only later that I tried rebooting and it worked.

 

[Dave Sherman]

Woohoo! Success! With Diskgenius, I was able to find out that the drive was corrupted enough that it had tons of orphaned files, wasn't a matter of files being hidden from the user directory, they were more or less "lost". I was able to find the files I was missing, and thankfully was able to recover them. Well worth the $99 to get the full version of it since they impose a size limit on the files you can recover with the freebie.