This episode will cover how to begin basic recovery – locating the problem and deriving a solution to the problem. The basic housekeeping needed to keep your laptop in shape at all times is also outlined.
Step E1-Begin
Windows users should look into Laplink PC Easy Transfer app to have a file ready to get transferred to a new laptop in case the current laptop goes belly up on you. It can transfer from earliest versions like XP all the way to Windows 10.
Failing that, Windows 7 onwards, Microsoft provides imaging provision that will image the entire disk along with an option to create a repair disk. Make use of it.
External USB hard drive manufactures like Seagate, provide an app that continuously backs up the files on the USB hard drive, even providing the versions of the same file backed up to help you go back to any version.
Step E1-S1
Ok you are now looking at your laptop, unable to boot or takes hours to boot. First thing first. Mine is a Windows 10 laptop. So start from there to know the operating system, the make, model and the serial number of the laptop. Don’t run to a service shop yet. Many a times service people will tell you that there might a hardware problem. They are usually right, but don’t yet go there.
I had an old Vista machine at home. If not, get help from your friends who may loan you the laptop for a short period or allow you to use it. Use it to create a Windows10 bootable USB sticks or drives. There are two versions 32-bit and 64-bit. If you are unsure of the bit-version, create both.
If you are creating a 64-bit bootable disc from a 32-bit machine like Vista, the bootable disk may not have the bootsect.exe file. There are apps like WinToUSB, to create such bootable disks if you do not want to go down the path I went – which was bit technical and free.
You are now prepared enough to see whether you can get your life back or not.
Step E1-S2
Stick that USB stick or dive into your broken down laptop and attempt the boot up from the USB stick. Pressing F2 to get into boot menu and changing the order from HDD boot to USB boot first will do the trick. Some boot menus will have UEFI boot as the default option set. Change it to CSM boot to help you recognize the USB drive. Please note that this step is for those laptops who have the issue of a slow boot – I mean virtually slow boot, taking sometimes up to 30 minutes.
Once you are able to boot from the USB drive, it will give you an option to install Windows10. Do not choose this option yet. Instead choose Repair my PC. It is usually a link that you can locate it at the bottom of the window.
Windows will start the diagnostics in an attempt to repair the PC, but if it can succeed nothing like it. However, you may get a message unable to repair message as Windows has locked the drive and giving you an instruction to unlock the drive first. Don’t choose the shutdown PC option, but choose Advanced options
Step E1-S3
Now you will face some daunting options that you might have to work with for first ever time. Attempt to Reset PC that gives you an option to reset the PC without losing your personal information. When you go down this path, you may still get the Windows has locked the drive message.
Trying restoring the PC to a previous restore point will not help as it will still fail on the drive being locked down by Windows.
The other option is to restore the PC from the image file created earlier. Please note that this will not work if you are facing the locked drive issue.
Step E1-End
You are at this end step, because you are not able to restart the PC from the USB bootable disk. Here onwards, you will focus on recovering as many files as possible from the hard drive before attempting some serious recovery options.
Lessons learnt
This episode follows some simple thinking. Observed problem is that the laptop cannot boot. We still have not identified the root cause. Known tools are created and used to attempt basic recovery, but we failed.
Goal now should be recover the personal data from the HDD as the basic recovery has failed.
What you have done is to modify the initial goal to add a newly achievable and compromised on the initial goal after the tools failed to assist you in achieving your initial goal. The task now is to achieve a goal that could help you take more intense steps to recover the PC, with a knowledge that you may lose the data, but you still have the data to recover from.