I need some suggestions recovering data from a HDD.
I have a Dell G7 laptop around 5 years old which had 128GB SSD Boot Drive, and 1 TB HDD data disk.
Today while operating the laptop my laptop suddenly froze and then I received the BSoD on Windows 11.
After the system rebooted, I could no longer view the disk drive, under disk management also.
I previously had a 2.5 in SATA enclosure to which I mounted the drive and tried connecting it to another system.
I could sometimes observe the drive getting recognized and could list the files and directories on the root of the drive, but I was unable to browse deeper into any of the directories. I also tried to copy the files, but it would just get stuck and had to disconnect the drive as this file transfer would completely block the system.
Should I go ahead with a professional data recovery, as I do not have backup available on the contents of the disk?
It depends on how important your files are. Professional data recovery is expensive. Seriously expensive. (think 2k USD and up!)
The one thing you can do yourself is make a 1:1 copy of the drive on a different system not running Win-OS (!!) Essentially, you boot a Sysrescuecd in a normal PC and create an image of the defective drive onto a known working drive (any data on that will be destroyed!). Using the newly created image, you can attempt a rescue yourself by running Photorec, which started out as a photo-recovery tool but now recognises many data formats.
Try cooling the drive with ice packs put drive in a ziplock bag and pack the icepacks around the outside of the bag for a couple hours.
Then try file copy.
If it still locks up the controller card on the drive is probably shot.
I have done something similar to this but put it in the freezer with the freezer bag and got the data off because it slows things down. Hooked it up to my external extractor and bam got as much off before it gave up.