Windows 10: Recovering data and restoring Windows 10 - Please save my bacon!

I must start by admitting I am an idiot and I've compounded that by having a couple of ridiculous accidents!

I managed to spill tea on my laptop the other week and it shut down immediately and wouldn't come back on again. That was accident number 1.

I did all the recommended things to dry it out, but without success, and was advised to get the hard drive out and see i I could save the data on it and back it up. I did that, mounted it in an external hard drive enclosure, with Sata cable and connected it to my partner's laptop by USB. It was able to see my HDD fine, with no damage. Both machines are about/ years old, 1TB storage.

I loaded Macrium Reflect onto her machine and then tried to shrink my partition to under 300MB, shrink hers to less than 700MB and clone my partition onto her machine. Whilst this was happening, I decided to get up from where I was balancing the laptop and that's when I had accident number 2: The hard drive enclosure which I hadn't screwed in as I was advised you can only do this 3/4 times with the nature of the screw threads slipped, pulling it out of the case and breaking the connection when the process was only 70% complete!! Macrium threw out some catastrophic error messages and I think the machine shut down I think I can't remember exactly what happened!

I restarted the machine, but when I did it was clear it had restarted as my PC, not hers. I shut it down, removed my hard drive, restarted and it would get no further than displaying a No Boot Device Found error. I've never managed to get past that since. I've followed instructions for playing with the BIOS to no avail. I've loaded my PC up through USB, and loaded partition recovery software Partition Wizard onto it, but it wouldn't recognise her partition although mine's fine!. I've tried data recovery software DiskGenius, but though that seems to find all the files she desperately wants, such as documents and Chrome bookmarks, they are corrupted or empty.

As it is now, I've given her partition a drive letter I has to to get the software to scan it, but have not formatted it. Looking with Disk Management, it shows as healthy, Primary and RAW, but none of the partitions on her disk show as having Boot, Page File and Crash Dump, as my primary partition does on my machine. There's still a recovery partition on the hard drive, setup by HP.

With considerable upset, she has come to accept that all her data is lost and now just wants the PC back and working - which isn't much to ask! And that's where we are. Before I make any more tragic mistakes, I want to ask the following:

1 can anyone see a way of getting the files back, error free?

2 can anyone see a way of restoring the partition?

3 should I format her partition and if so how either through command prompts or with my PC loaded up?

4 with my HDD unplugged, how do I get her machine to use the recovery partition on her disk and restore windows 10 to her partition, making it boot from it in the future? I was hoping to do this from the HDD partition rather than a USB stick, but is this possible?

Any help would be very gratefully received!

:)

 

Clearing (and restoring) Private data


Hi I have some Questions about „cleaning“ up or removing personal/private data & configuration from a Windows 10 PC.

It is about a PC that should be sent to the Vendor to get repaired.
It is not my PC but from a friend.
Usually in such a case I would create an image from the System and reset the OS to factory settings to wipe the data/settings.
But this time I don’t have enough space (and will not have time for it) (Don’t need suggestions for Imaging).

The normal Data (documents, pictures …) are regularly saved / backup so not needed to be saved additionally.
The goal would be removing / backing up the personal Data (in a fast and space saving way) to have them removed and make it possible to put them back, but not deleting /removing the installed Programs, applications and Games (Win32).

From my experience with Windows 7 or Older PCs I would also:

• Browser: backup Profile and clean it (Easy to restore)
• Mail Program: backup Profile and clean it (Easy to restore)
• Change User password (easy to restore)

But as for Windows 10 there are some new … implications about the

• connected Microsoft account
• and the Apps

How to deal with them?
How to remove / disconnect them in a way I can restore afterwards again?

 

Windows XP PRO error after restore

System restore is handy when it works like it did for me 2 days ago saving the need to reinstall all of my software as well as windows, id suggest using norton Ghost 12 for an excellent system restore feature.

 

Need to recover files from my Memory card

Today's Giveaway is "7-Data Recovery Suite 2.3"
Key features:

• Recover data from both local drives and mobile storage devices;
• Recover documents, emails, photos, videos, audio files and more;
• Mobile phone recovery on Windows.

• 
  All-in-one Data Recovery Software rescuing your file under almost any condition. FREE for 24 hours on GOTD!