Recently the 2TB Western Digital Blue 3D NAND solid state C drive on my less than year-old HP ENVY 795 – 0050 workstation running Windows 10 version 2009 experienced a catastrophic failure.
Fortunately, I had an identical replacement drive in storage and all I thought I needed to do was to replace the non functioning SSD with a new one, use Acronis 2019 to recover the operating system and files from the workstation’s D drive or an external drive, and get back to work.
Unfortunately, after multiple attempts, I could not recover the system using Acronis Rescue Media stored on a USB flash drive.
As a last resort, I turned to a HP Recovery Kit stored on a USB drive to format the new SSD and return the workstation to its as delivered condition. It worked. After installation the machine booted and was ready to upgrade to Windows 10 Professional and install a series of Windows updates.
After completing the Windows update process, I installed Acronis 2019 from a CD and tried to recover my programs, documents, photos, etc. again. Nope, Acronis failed again.
The next step in the recovery process was to reinstall the programs I use on a regular basis: Microsoft Office 2019 Professional, WordPerfect Office X9 and associated programs, Adobe Acrobat, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional, MathWorks, etc. I also recovered Outlook 2019 and Dragon profiles from files I had exported to backup drives independent of the Acronis backups.
I then installed the “non functioning” SSD drive in a NexStar CX external hard drive enclosure and plugged the USB cable into the workstation in hopes that I could at least recover my document files. Once again failure. The drive simply was not readable.
As a last resort, I downloaded and installed Wondershare Data Recovery. After scanning the damaged SSD drive for just over 16 hours Wondershare “recovered” 1,647,965 files. Unfortunately, I was only able to actually recover a couple of Excel spreadsheets and a bunch of graphic images from the Wondershare’s recovered files.
What I did learn after running Wondershare was that our practice of using PCmover Professional to move applications, files, and settings from old to new computers over the decades resulted in the transfer of a huge amount of detritus from a Windows XP machine to a Windows 7 PC, and ultimately to the current Windows 10 HP workstation. We will think twice before using PC Mover again in an attempt to avoid moving a growing number of garbage files from machine to machine.
The next step in the recovery process was to copy all of the document files from the old Lenovo Windows 7 workstation that I had retired in January 2020 to an external drive and then transfer them to the new HP PC. It worked. Then came the painful effort to track down copies of spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. created during 2020 from a variety of places including, but not limited to, cloud storage and email attachments.
In all, it probably took three days to recover the system and I will have to continue tracking down or recreating “lost” files over time.
Out of curiosity I wondered I could reformat the “damage SSD drive”. It worked. I then ran Western Digital’s Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on the old SSD. It passed with flying colors. That done I thought I would simply clone the workstation’s recovered C drive onto the old SSD and put it away for safekeeping. It worked.
Having gone through the process of recovering a C drive with document files dating back as far as the mid-nineteen eighties I began to wonder if it would be smarter to simply periodically clone a computer’s C drive onto an external drive and then copy the machines document files onto the D drive and/or an external drive on a periodic basis for safe keeping.
Using the cloning/copying approach, I would not have to go through the uncertainty of using recovery software such as Acronis in the future.
