sglee
asked on
Recovery of OS partition
Hi,I have an internal hard drive that seems to have lost information about boot section after attempting "Restore to factory settings" on the laptop.
Having realized that it started "restore to factory settings", the user powered off the laptop, but when it was turned back on, OS was gone and it failed to boot.
So I hooked up the hard drive to another PC and ran Disk Management and this is what I see.
When I open "My Computer", I see:
(1) O "HP_RECOVERY" drive which has folders like "boot", "efi", "FIRTOOLS", "sources" and files like "SYstemrecovery", bootmgr.efi, HP_WINRE
(2) L (64GB NTFS) Drive: empty
(3) K (SYSTEM 1GB): it has tow items. "Recovery" folder and SYSTEM file.
I think "619.25GB - Unallocated" is where Windows OS and user folders used to be stored.
Is there a tool that I can use to look at the contents of "619.25GB - Unallocated"?
Thanks.
Unallocated mean it not assigned writable space, so there will be nothing to see. Basically it's 619GB of available space on that hard drive that needs to first be allocated in order to become writable, but currently there is absolutely nothing on it. Looking at you screenshot it looks like that one drive has been broken up into 3 different writable partitions, while 619GB + 2GB has been allocated yet so they can't be written to at that moment until they are created partitions or extended to become apart of the current partitions.
You could attempt to allocate the space as a partition and you might get lucky (but do NOT attempt to format it). Or, this process might just wipe it completely. My guess is that the recovery process first destroyed the partition, then it was going to set up a new partition and start the OS install once again.
At this point, your best option would be to continue the process. Put the HD back in the original PC. Power on and get into the boot menu, then see if you can boot from the HP_RECOVERY partition. This should allow you to reinstall the OS and complete the factory reset process. If not, perhaps the computer came with a recovery media (CD/DVD) that can be used for the same. If all this fails, contacting the vendor for assistance is certainly a good next step.
At this point, your best option would be to continue the process. Put the HD back in the original PC. Power on and get into the boot menu, then see if you can boot from the HP_RECOVERY partition. This should allow you to reinstall the OS and complete the factory reset process. If not, perhaps the computer came with a recovery media (CD/DVD) that can be used for the same. If all this fails, contacting the vendor for assistance is certainly a good next step.
1. create partition
2. do recovery! there are plenty of commercial software for partition recovery.
2. do recovery! there are plenty of commercial software for partition recovery.
ASKER
Sorry for late reply:
I agree that all the data is gone from the main partition as it started "Recovery process". It was too late when I turned the computer off.
For the hack of it, I will try to allocate the space on 619GB partition, but I doubt that it will bring back original files and folders. I will report back.
"do recovery! there are plenty of commercial software for partition recovery. " ---> I understand that it is an option, but in this case it is not worth it.
I agree that all the data is gone from the main partition as it started "Recovery process". It was too late when I turned the computer off.
For the hack of it, I will try to allocate the space on 619GB partition, but I doubt that it will bring back original files and folders. I will report back.
"do recovery! there are plenty of commercial software for partition recovery. " ---> I understand that it is an option, but in this case it is not worth it.
This question needs an answer!
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