Hello All,

Last night I went to start up some poker and got a reboot and select proper boot device. My HDD was not showing up in BIOS so I removed it and put it in a thermaltake blacx adapter and plugged it in to a laptop. I get the device connected ding, but the drive wouldn't show up in Windows Explorer.

I poked around the web and ended up downloading AOMEI partition assistant, and for the disk it shows unknown disk unreadable, and also basic MBR 0.00kb. The drive is a 500GB drive, but it's showing 0.

Is this drive fried or do I need to rebuild MBR to get anything to show back up?

TIA

It sounds like your disk isn't working. How important is it to you to recover what was stored on that disk? It might be easier and more efficient use of your time to just use a new/fresh disk and reinstall Windows on that.

Josem, it's kind of important. The drive had all my poker hands and such on it. Nothing on the level of wedding photos or anything, but if there is a way I can restore it to normal, I would much rather do that.

Thanks

The drive is probably dead. This is why a good backup regime is important. It doesn't sound like the data is worth spending thousands of dollars to send off to a data recovery service for a shot at retreiving.

Your poker sites can probably send you all your HHs

Thanks guys. Would it really cost thousands of dollars to recover everything off of it?

If I buy a new drive, how do I install windows on it? This was a Dell XPS purchased from BB. I don't think I ever got a windows disk with the tower.

Thanks again

google windows media creation tool
you need an 8gb+ usb drive (stick)
their app will guide you through the steps, you just press next next, wait 5 mins, all done

you will then need to boot from the usb drive, spam the delete key while the computer is starting up, that will take you to the bios (uefi). there, usually the last option on the right in the columns, there's the boot order, put the usb stick first on that list, save and exit
when the pc restarts, it will start installing windows, your windows official key is saved on your motherboard, no need to get another one

better do an offline install (when it asks you to connect to the internet, click on offline) and refuse all of their options to log in, or sync devices, also deactivate all the telemetry, options, you'll see there's a list with about 7-8 things to toggle, have everything off

once it finishes installing, it will restart the pc and take you straight to your fresh copy of windows. first thing you do is check for updates, let it run everything it needs to. next, go to Dell's support page and download the chipset driver and anything else you find useful. the gpu driver better get from the manufacturer's site, it will be a newer version

that's about it, gl. takes no more than an hour all in all.

Thanks, any recs for what I should get? Old drive was a Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB. Would a solid state drive be a standard swap out? Not sure if they use the same connections or what not. Sorry, I have little experience with internals of computer components.

yes, a 2.5" ssd will use the same 2 cables as your old hard drive, one for power, one for data

You were still working with a mechanical harddisk ? You are in for a treat when you swap for an SSD

yeah, I don't swap out or upgrade stuff when it comes to computer internals because I know nothing about what to do. I have SSD's in multiple laptops. But my desktop which I used for poker since like 2011 finally had the HD fail.

As an aside, the site I play on will not (can not?) send me my hand histories. I don't play much anymore, and only uNL since I only have a few hundred online, but I crush the game for like 20bb/100 (super soft low traffic site) but it was nice to see a green line like / and a red line a little less slanted than that.

Any thoughts on what I can do to recover my HH?

What sort of mickey mouse operation are they running there? Perhaps play at a legit site in the future?

Realistically, you might be able to buy a device to plug your hard drive into your PC, something along these lines: https://www.amazon.co.uk/USB-SATA-Ad...9650540&sr=8-3

Then, you'll either be able to read some stuff on your disk, or you won't. IF you can't read anything on your disk, then realistically, the data is gone.

Any difference between your link and this?

https://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-H.../dp/B001A4HAFS

Site is Juicy (cake)

Looks fine for your proposed usage. Yours is USB2.0 rather than USB3.0, so theoretically it will have a smaller data transfer speed, but I doubt it will matter much either way in this use case.

Probably done then. When I plug it in I get the device connected chime, but the drive doesn't show up in explorer.

Sigh

post this on tom's hardware forum

I'll give it a go, some people from there helped me in the past with a work computer.

Thanks

they have a section on storage , the forum is pretty active and the quality of advice is good
let us know if you managed to un-brick it

"Yes, I'm afraid it's dead.

There are data recovery services available, but those are too expensive to justify for most.

The only good solution for most is preventive: A good backup habit that turns the once-per-few-year storage media failure into a once-per-lifetime double or triple failure of a common cause i.e. theft, accidental overwrite, or existential crisis of any flavour."

Only one reply so far but it seems that it's pretty much dead and going to be expensive to recover.

meh

oh well, in the future, Google Drive is free for 15gb and you can have it periodically sync a folder on your pc to their cloud storage, so perfectly usable for your hand histories

OneDrive is also excellent - the combination of Skype (free calls to my family in Australia) plus MS Office plus One Drive makes it great value for me