Failed Hard Drive - No Bootable Devices found!! Advice please!

[TTU]

My SSD hardrive failed in my Dell Inspiron 15 laptop a few weeks ago with a "No Bootable Devices Found" error message at startup BIOS.

I was hoping some of you have experience salvaging data in these type of situations.

What I've tried

• I tried loading Ubuntu on a thumb drive to try to access the hard drive -- no go. The drive did not show up in the devices list.
  I tried reconnecting the hardrive drive from the labtop in case there was a faulty connection and to reset the drive, no go.
  I tried using SATA to usb cable to see if I can clone the drive, but the drive is not being read. It shows the Cable interface is connected with 0MB connected to it.
  When booting, I could not find the drive in the list. When I used ubuntu via USB, the usb did show up and was booted from.

Questions

• Does windows 10 have any security features which would prevent ubuntu from reading the hard drive?

What Happened Prior To Failure

• I was connecting a new vizio tv to the laptop via hdmi 2 when I noticed the drive began to be sluggish. Task manager showed 100 percent memory disk usage so I rebooted while it was in this state. Never got it running again. The initial boot a memory test ran and showed no errors were preset. The boots that followed showed no bootable devices found.

Hard Drive

• The Hard Drive in question is a LITEON SATA SSD 512 GB
  Windows 10
  Dell Inspiron 15

I know this is a long shot, but figured I'd ask to see if I can somehow manually salvage the data. If I can't find a solution myself, I might have to send it off to a data retrieval company, which is very expensive. Any advice?

Attached are a few error messages and the hard drive information.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2U6lSEG_3j9V2ZmdFlOVzVTRms

IMG_20171013_124233.jpg - Google Drive

IMG_20171013_124248.jpg -

[DaveLembke]

Connecting the SSD to another computer via a USB to SATA caddie or internally might be worth a shot in case the issue is with the main boards SATA controller and not the drive. Its most likely that the drive is bad, but maybe there was a static spark that surged the main board when connecting that cable that did main board damage.

SSD's are almost impossible to retrieve data from. Hard Drives are easier since the platters retain the data. On SSD's the data is locked on the memory of memory chips.

If you want the data off this drive you might have to pay to have it recovered and that would involved them troubleshooting the main board of the SSD to determine the problem and then fix that problem to limp it along to get the data recovered or movement of the actual chips to another same SSD board with chips all placed exact to the board they came off of if all chips are healthy, otherwise 1 blown chip of say 32 chips that make up that 512GB SSD and you will have some data present and other data lost as well as fragments of files where some of the file is on that blown chip and the other part of the file contents is spanned to a healthy chip.

Most people take the loss of data as for its quite costly to recover data. Hopefully you had some sort of backup in place so that you dont have a total data loss. There are free cloud storage options available as well so that your data is protected in the future if you havent already implemented use of cloud storage.

[TTU]

Yes, I'm looking into companies now. If I have to, I'm willing to spend however much I need to in order to salvage the data 500-2000! It has 8 months of work on it that is simply priceless to me. I am all backed up until 8 months ago.

I did try the SATA to usb but the drive was not able to be read. The cable was found but the device showed OMB.

Anything else I can try, to hopefully save quite a bit of money? Maybe some kind of software?

[BC_Programmer]

If the data is as valuable as you say, you should immediately remove the drive- as in, right now, and keep it in a safe place. Then consult with data recovery services to see what they can offer for SSD drives, with the brand and model information on-hand as that can affect their quote. The more you mess with the drive to try to get it working or "recover" data and the more likely that it will be damaged further or that the data will be harder or even impossible to recover, assuming it isn't already.

From what I can find you would be looking at something like $3,000+ for Data recovery services with an SSD. And that price tag applies regardless of whether data is recovered as far as I can tell.

[TTU]

Thanks. I removed the hard drive a while ago and replaced it in the laptop (the one I'm using now). That 3000 price tag scares me a bit. The little research I've done points closer to figures around 500-1000, upwards to 2k. I know SSD is harder to recover from so this might affect the price. At the end of the day, I have to pay whatever I need to to salvage it, just hoping I can find a good company I can trust and not have to pay the overhead already mentioned here to support one of the larger companies.

Nearly all of them have a policy where if they can't salvage the data, I don't have to pay anything, so atleast that is good. It is also good that a lot of them claim very high percentile success rates, even in SSD. Very happy about that.