thomasm516
New member
Hello everyone! This is my first post to this forum. I work in IT, and I am familiar with recovering data from spinning disks, but this is the first time that I've had to attempt data recovery from an SSD.
About two weeks ago, the morning after we pushed out Windows updates, the SSD in one of our machines apparently failed. This is an M.2 2280 SSD. The machine attempts to boot and eventually throws out an error reading, "Unmountable Boot Volume." The message indicates that the system will restart, which it does, and then it just repeats the cycle. I was able to get to the Dell Diagnostics, and it reports no errors. I was also able to get into the Windows 10 recovery menu and tried every option to no avail. I created a bootable USB thumb drive hoping to get to the files that way, but could not access the drive. I thought about trying CHKDSK and SFC, but from the command line I could not access the SSD, so could not run those commands against the drive. I pulled the drive and tried it in a known good machine and the same behavior was seen, so the problem is clearly with the drive. I then installed the drive in an external SSD enclosure and plugged it into the USB port on a working machine. I get prompted for the Bitlocker key, which I have, but after entering the key I just get, "Access is denied."
I have been reading about recovering data from SSDs, and have just learned about TRIM. I have not yet had a chance to find out if it is enabled on our drives or not. That said, the files that I am trying to recover were never deleted. I believe that the files are still there, but just aren't reachable. If so, then the question is how can I get to the files?
The files are not critical enough that we would pay for a data recovery service.
Any help that you can offer will be greatly appreciated.
--Tom
About two weeks ago, the morning after we pushed out Windows updates, the SSD in one of our machines apparently failed. This is an M.2 2280 SSD. The machine attempts to boot and eventually throws out an error reading, "Unmountable Boot Volume." The message indicates that the system will restart, which it does, and then it just repeats the cycle. I was able to get to the Dell Diagnostics, and it reports no errors. I was also able to get into the Windows 10 recovery menu and tried every option to no avail. I created a bootable USB thumb drive hoping to get to the files that way, but could not access the drive. I thought about trying CHKDSK and SFC, but from the command line I could not access the SSD, so could not run those commands against the drive. I pulled the drive and tried it in a known good machine and the same behavior was seen, so the problem is clearly with the drive. I then installed the drive in an external SSD enclosure and plugged it into the USB port on a working machine. I get prompted for the Bitlocker key, which I have, but after entering the key I just get, "Access is denied."
I have been reading about recovering data from SSDs, and have just learned about TRIM. I have not yet had a chance to find out if it is enabled on our drives or not. That said, the files that I am trying to recover were never deleted. I believe that the files are still there, but just aren't reachable. If so, then the question is how can I get to the files?
The files are not critical enough that we would pay for a data recovery service.
Any help that you can offer will be greatly appreciated.
--Tom
