Help -- I Think I Lost an Entire Drive Worth of Data
After using your other products for over four years, I'm sure this is not your fault, but I engaged OneKey Recovery on my Lenovo laptop/tablet (upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 a year ago). Their was a pause of several minutes (like the software was working) and then nothing. When I tried to re-start -- nothing.
I moved the drive to my desktop (through a USB connector) and it showed the partitions on it were missing in Partition Manager PRO. The entire drive was unallocated. Next I tried initializing the drive but I got an error. I tried several things but every one returned errors. Also, a check partition returned all sectors were bad.
Several of the errors returned said it could't perform the task because other tasks were running. So, I created a USB flash PE boot drive and used it to boot to my desktop. Everything looked the same -- same errors. I replaced the drive back in my laptop, and I was going to perform the same tasks there, but I decided to wait and try to discuss this with someone from AOMEI because I'm basically over my head and don't have any idea what I'm doing.
The only good news here is that I don't think I damaged the drive after I ran the initial OneKey task, as I am fairly certain the Partition Manager has refused to write anything to the drive, regardless of what task I tried to run (but it will rebuild the MBR). Also, the drive will not initialize in Windows Disk Manager. It reports the drive is not ready, no matter whether it's an Initialize task or Online task.
One other possible clue, my BIOS or maybe Windows (not sure which), would not load the right device driver for a hard drive. That's why I'm planning to move it back to the laptop and boot the PE there, so it will be installed on the SATA port.
I'd appreciate any assistance you could provide. I've got a lot of data at stake.
Comments
Hi, does OneKey Recovery damage your hard drive? Did you try to perform a system backup?
Nothing damaged.
>> One other possible clue, my BIOS or maybe Windows (not sure which),
would not load the right device driver for a hard drive. That's why I'm
planning to move it back to the laptop and boot the PE there, so it will
be installed on the SATA port.
This was the problem. Don't know why I never thought of it. When I moved the drive back to the laptop and booted the laptop using my PE boot flash drive (created by Partition Manager) I was able to access the drive and work with it.
I'm still not sure why the laptop didn't start up after I ran the OneKey Recovery on it. But when I moved the drive to my desktop using a USB connector, for some reason, the desktop would not recognize it as a mass storage device.
Once I was able to access the drive from Partition Manager, I could set up the partitions properly.
I was reading WinPE documentation on the Microsoft site, and I ran across exactly where the problem was coming from.
Avoid USB 3.0 ports if the firmware does not contain native support for USB 3.0.
I was connecting the drive through a USB 3.0 port to my desktop computer, and Partition Assistant couldn't work with it. It was doing all sorts of strange things, and I thought it was because something happened to the drive, when I applied the OneKey Recovery to it when it was in the laptop.
I subsequently connected the drive to a USB 2.0 port on my desktop and everything started working properly. I was able to use Partition Assistant to resolve the tasks I was trying to do.