All my desktop data gone after lots of bleeping, please help me get it back!

[digiman2372]

Hello everyone, several months ago my HP pavillion dv-6 laptop started making bleeping noises as I booted it up. sometimes it would even boot up very slowly.  After a couple of weeks of this bleeping, a found that all my personal data on the desktop was gone after I logged into my user account. and the background picture was changed too. shortcuts to programs remained though. is there any way I can get it all back? I tried doing a system restore for the user account but no luck. maybe I should try it for the whole computer? I just don't want to mess anything up, please help! I had so much valuable information that I need!

[Allan]

What personal data on the desktop? Those would all be shortcuts, and that's not unusual with a new account. The data should still be on the hd.

[digiman2372]

there were a few GIF's and microsoft word documents. I tried making a new account and then transferring all the old documents to the new account but the missing desktop documents werent even there, so it was pointless. would a system restore work? There HAS to be a way to get these documents back!

[Allan]

The documents would still be in your my documents folder. Just because the desktop shortcuts are missing doesn't mean the data is missing.

[digiman2372]

I tried looking there in the documents folder and I cant find any of it. is it in a different folder possibly? I also heard of a data recovery program called mini tool, would this be of any help?

[digiman2372]

anybody there? someone else saw my speecy link and said my hardrive is failing. i don't think there is too much time left for me to figure this out.. if I dont get instructions soon,  im just going to try the minitool data recovery program.  also should i keep my laptop from updating? it wants to update but im afraid that might make things harder.

here is the speccy link to see my computer details: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/EwSZx8c3zhhNMqIOWLoE6Kb

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

The person who said the hard drive is failing is correct. I wouldn't be doing anything else with the drive except to make a Raw copy to a drive in good condition. Don't try running recovery software on the drive only on the copy. The reason for this from the speccy report   TOSHIBA MK6476GSX SATA Disk
05
Attribute name: Reallocated Sectors Count
Real value: 1,248
Current: 40
Worst: 40
Threshold: 10
Raw Value: 00000004E0
Status: Good

This is not good and will get worse the longer you use the disk.

Either send it to a recovery company OR you could using a Blank usb  1 TB drive or larger make a raw copy of the failing drive then run recovery software on the USB drive.

Do you have another computer available you can use to do the copy if not you will need to make a usb pendrive to boot the computer and make the copy.

If you have another computer to attach the drives to you can use disk copy from here https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
If you need to do it on the laptop then perhaps use ddrescue boot from here http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/

Bottom line..... don't keep using the drive  and if you need data from the drive make a raw copy first and then do the recovery from the copy only.

[OliverYY]

this is caused by hard drive file system error. as a result, the files saved on the desktop are showing up neither on the specified location nor anywhere on the entire computer hard drive. They are completely lost.

please don't try to repair the hard drive, reinstall os or other operations. because use of drive may cause data overwritten issue and you will lose all data.
try a professional data recovery app as soon as possible, like iBoysoft Data Recovery, minitool, or easeus. remember not to download and install them on your c drive.

the bad news is that it's not 100% sure that you will get all lost data back. because your files were stored on the desktop which tend to be written over.

[digiman2372]

thank you so much for your responses guys! I feel like i'm finally coming to a conclusion with this situation, whether it ends good or bad.

as far as my resources are concerned, I have another lower grade laptop, but its much newer. and I also have a desktop. both have CD drives. I also have a 1T external hard drive. Can I use the hard drive? How many gigs of data would I need to back up the laptops hard drive for scanning?

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

You will need for the 1TB harddrive to be blank. This because a raw copy of the failing drive will use the first 640 GB of the 1 TB hard drive.  Overwriting the data on the drive. Professional recovery software makes an image file 640 gb in size which can then be scanned for deleted/ missing files. The tools i linked earlier will need a blank drive.

[digiman2372]

so i decided to buy a new external hard drive because i have nowhere to put the data on the one I already had. I barely was able to buy one now because it has been raining like crazy the past few days and I only have a motorcycle, not a car, so I had to wait the rain out. anyhow im trying make a raw copy using the HDD raw copy tool 1.10 and it keeps giving me this error message. "NOTE: this tool will NOT copy your boot(OS system). the tool requires absolute exclusive access to the source media. if you want to copy/image your boot hard drive, then you would have to attach it temporarily to another PC and perform the Task on that PC". what do I do?

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

Then as per my previous post.

If you need to do it on the laptop then perhaps use ddrescue boot from here http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/

you write it to a pen drive or CD and boot the laptop from the media.

[digiman2372]

sorry I read it wrong. A member in another forum recommended I use clonezilla as well. I did this and im having issues. there were error messages as it booted up and it would let me see my partitions. here are some screenshots. I dont know why they keep loading upside down, i tried to rotate them but its not working. would it be easier if I used system rescue? or is there an underlying problem with my laptop causing these errors?

[Lisa_maree]

Reading thru the conversion I hope you are not downloading to and using the drive in the laptop when there is data you need to recover . It is very important not to write anything to the drive as it is likely to over write what you want to recover. If you have been using the laptop since the data loss. Then perhaps just load reclaimme it's fast and will only load another 8 mb onto the drive then do the recovery on the drive under windows. This software is not free. https://www.reclaime.com/

This goes against all best practices for data recovery but you are working against time. 

The reason I suggested SystemRescueCD is the kernel and software are up to date, the last update was 2020-03-29: so it was more likely to support your hardware. Please don't download it to the laptop use another computer if you want to use this option.

[digiman2372]

Lisa, thank you so much for reminding me not to download anything straight to the laptop!!!!! So i can download systemrescue on my desktop and then put it on my USB drive, and use that same USB drive to boot systemrescue on the laptop correct?

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

Sorry after i posted about system rescue I re visited using it, and it doesn't have as easy access to DDrescue as I thought so I would give that disk a miss.

Suggest you cover all possibilities with Hirens Boot disk from here https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

And yes, use your desktop to download and make either a pen drive or CD. Boot and run Recuva to scan the Laptop drive for your files