SSD Drive failure: need to plant windows backup into another hard drive

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Tonyzee

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Feb 3, 2015
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New issue updated for Feb 8:
I have found a windowsimagebackup from October 2013 that I want to use. Its an old system restore but it will do the trick. However every time I try to use it, it wants to fully reformat the entire disk the backup resides on. I do not want that because I have a TB of data I want to keep.

I borrowed an old HDD my old PC and installed a fresh copy of windows 7 on it. Now I have 2 hard disk and I want the old HDD to act as the system disk. But the system backup is on the newer 1TB hard disk.

How can I transfer or plant the systemimagebackup from 1TB drive to the old HDD so that when I run the windows boot CD it will restore from the old HDD?

Help needed!!


Below was my original issue that I have given up on. It seem like a total hardware failure. Not much I can do

I got hit with the:
disc boot failure insert system disk and press enter

I have a Windows 7 ACER computer, SSD by Liteon, the PC is 2 years old. I have not messed with the hardware for months. It just suddenly died. The SSD was my primary driver (100GB) and I also have a HDD (1TB) secondary drive.

I went digging and found that the SSD is recognized in my bios but it is not recognized by my windows 7 boot CD.

I took the SSD to a friend's place and plugged into his PC, it shows up as a new disk (but I cannot click inside without formatting it).

My questions are:
1. How do I know if this is a software issue or a hardware issue?
2. If this is simply software, how do I get the SSD working again?
3. If this is hardware, how can I recover the data from SSD and put it into my HDD? As in keep everything from both the SSD and HDD, and combine them in the HDD.

Since I don't have a computer anymore I have lots of time on my hand. It does not matter the difficulty, I can handle your suggestions!

Best,

Tony
 
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Gathaven

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Feb 2, 2015
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I went digging and found that the SSD is recognized in my bios but it is not recognized by my windows 7 boot CD.
Click to expand...

Any chance you're booting from a Windows 7 CD on a USB flash drive? This is a known issue that has caused me much grief, and to this day I still have no idea why.

I'm sure someone else will happily reply to you with a long list of steps for the huge amounts of different ways you can test it, I'll give you two ways I can think of off the bat, and the two ways I'd probably do it, admittedly, I'm not a Windows user.

Way #1:- Boot into Linux, run `fdisk -l` to list all the disks, find the device file of your disk based on it's size, then look at the partition table (`fdisk -l /dev/sdX`, where X is any alphabetic character) and see if your partitions are intact, if they are, try and mount them (`blockdev --setro /dev/sdX`, `mkdir /mnt/hdd` then `mount -oro /dev/sdXY /mnt/hdd` (where Y is the partition number)), see if you can mount them/etc, if you can, poke around the HDD (`cd /mnt/hdd`, `ls`, etc...) to see if your filesystem is intact.

Way #2:- Boot back into the Windows installation media, click 'repair your computer', open up a command prompt then use `diskpart`. Start with `diskpart` to get into the prompt of diskpart, then run `list disk` and see if your disk is in the list, if it's in the list, use `select disk 0` (Where 0 is the disk number) and thne `list partition`, select the partition your operating system was installed on (Probably #2, unless you've specifically chosen otherwise) using `select partition 2` and run `detail partition`, that should give you the letter (ltr) like so, once you have that (in my case D), type 'exit' followed by 'D:' or whatever letter yours was, from there poke around (dir, cd, etc...) to see if your filesystem is intact.
 
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g90814

g90814

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Apr 11, 2013
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Sounds to me like a hardware issue, the SSD is most likely toast.

It's unlikely you'd be able to recover any information from it if you cannot read it on another computer.

Unless the drive is still under warranty (usually listed on drive) then your best solution is to just buy a new one and re-install your OS.

Lesson learned: always keep backups of important files. Cloud storage is so cheap nowadays. I pay $1/month for OneDrive 50GB storage.
 
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Tonyzee

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So if you plug in a normal, functioning SSD to another PC, it should show up like an external drive where you could click right in and see all the goodies inside?
 
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Tonyzee

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I will try the second way when I get the drive back! I was booting windows 7 CD off of a DVD. I had the stock home premium on the PC so I downloaded the home premium boot disk from the internet and burned it.
 
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g90814

g90814

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Yes, UNLESS you used a bios password when starting up. Then you can only access the drive on the same computer, unless you remove the bios password before taking the drive to a new computer. Basically, the bios startup password also prevents the drive data from being accessed on another system.

 
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Tonyzee

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No password that I know of. I'm not a IT professional so I have not encrypted anything on purpose for my personal PC.
 
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g90814

g90814

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A bios startup password is a good idea if you have any important data on your system, it can be very simple, and does not slow down the system like real encryption does :)

But in any case, I think your SSD is hosed, sorry :(
 
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Tonyzee

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I will look into it and report back!
 
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Tonyzee

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HD sentinel can see the SSD. It says performance and health are both excellent. TRIM features are enabled.

However, it is the only hard disk where the HD sentinel cannot see the temperature or its hard disk size.
 
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Tonyzee

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So basically everything (bios, windows boot disk, HD sentenel, acronis, command prompt) can see the disk, see the capacity and full name. However, none of them could access it in any way. I cannot even format the failed sad from boot disk.

If I'm giving up on the disk, how can I recover the system without formatting my HDD? I want to keep all data but just add windows 7 to it!
 
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Tonyzee

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I have the report. Its pretty long.
Here is a portion of it:
Security enabled? No
Security locked? No
Security frozen? Yes
 
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