OS And Data Recovery

[asere]

Hello, I am posting because I have a customer with a bad hard drive, ran Smart check and passed, HP has a short DST check that has failed. It no longer boots and I have attempted recovery with both errors, "NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM or FAT_FILE_SYSTEM" errors when attempted to boot to the OS or recovery partition. The drive is buzzing but it will still operate long enough to clone the drive, already tested moving out their User profile.

My question is, to recover the windows 10 OS and Data, which I can get the data still, and external readers can read the drive, should I clone it and then run SFC or make a media creation key and attempt to repair the cloned OS this way? If neither looks like a good option, I know what the latter is and have already informed them they may only get some data back and need a fresh install on a new HDD. They really would like to keep some applications such as their adobe photoshop and quick books as they no longer have the disks. This was a free upgrade to windows 10 from windows 7.

I am curious to know what the rest you may think would be a more satisfying resolution for the customer. I am still waiting for their replacement drive so I have about a week to resolve this another way.

**This is my first post and I apologize if I have not posted this in the correct location.**

 

[DelJo63]

If you can access the %userprofile%, then capture that, as all user data is there.

• The get a new HD,
• Install the OS
• and copy the captured %userprofile% data back onto the new system.

When the first conflict occurs, reply Skip/Ignore for all and the data will be restored.

 

[asere]

This will pull program files over but they would need registry entries to function, will they not?

 

[DelJo63]

NO!! It's far better to perform a clean install and preserve JUST the user data.

 

[asere]

I understand, I will of course capture the profile before I attempt to clone it. If cloning fails I can just make another win10 image and do a fresh install as you have pointed out. I am grabbing the new drive today if possible.

 

[DelJo63]

Starting from your symptom, the corruption can be anywhere, so you might even FIRST attempt a partition table tool to see if that was the primary issue.

Otherwise, recovering ANYTHING from such a disk, can lead to corruption to the new HD (easily corrected) after all your hard work. Bad data in the \Windows or \Program Files areas can be a nightmare to diagnose and fix one-by-one and you never know if you got them all. Bugger it and keep the newly installed image.

Yeah, it means reinstalling all third-party applications and that's not fun either, but it is productive and you know when you're done