C: drive suddenly showing as unformatted?

Hi all,

I've got a friend of the family's desktop here. It is an older Inspiron 620 running Win10 22H2 (I'm assuming, I can't boot it up to check, but it does have auto-updates turned on, so...)

A few years back the HDD was upgraded to a Crucial 1TB SSD. It's been working great...until now. This weekend she shut her computer down, then went to visit her mother who lives a few hours away for a few days. When she came back, her computer would turn on, but not boot at all. It would POST, but after that just a black screen and the HDD indicator light would just light up solid.

I assumed it may be a hard drive issue or a drive partition issue. The BIOS sees the drive and I can see the drive from a Linux Live USB, but it won't mount under Linux (it's an NTFS formatted drive) which is weird because I've used the same Linux stick to access MANY NTFS drives in the past.

I booted it up in Macrium Reflect's Live USB, but the 'Fix Windows Boot Issues' option doesn't give me the choice to use it and the C: partition with Windows is listed as 'Unformatted Primary' so something must've majorly messed up the filesystem.

I tried a chkdsk and that showed it fixing a lot of errors, but the drive is still being listed as 'Unformatted Primary' in Macrium, so clearly that chkdsk didn't help....

She has some older backups, but not everything is on them so I would love to try and save what is on this drive if I can. I am cloning it as it stands to a different drive right now so I can try and work on it from that drive.

Any ideas or methods I could use to try and repair the filesystem on that disk?

Thanks!

SIW2 said:

you ran chkdsk against an unformatted partition?


I would take a look with diskgenius , it can sometimes fix partition table problems, but it depends what the damage is.

For example, diskmgmt shows the disk as unitialized. Diskgenius fixed it

Backup image as iso files | Windows 11 Forum

Yes, macrium still lists the partition as having a drive letter, despite saying it is 'unformatted primary' so I tried chkdisk on it from the command prompt on the Macrium Live USB.

I can't boot it to try DiskGenius, so I'll try and take the SSD out, put it in an enclosure and run diskgenius on a different Win10 laptop?

SIW2 said:

or create diskgenius boot media on a working machine, if the working machine has the right kind of winre.wim

OK, I'll try checking the disk through a USB enclosure on my other laptop first.

I've never used DiskGenius before...is there a certain command I should be running?

Thanks for the help by the way!

OK, just started up DiskGenius....it's showing a 'cyclic redundancy check' error on the SSD I am having issues on and the OS partition is listed as 'damaged'

How should I go about trying to recover it?

EDIT - 'Tools / Check Partition Table Error' claims there are no errors?

The picture of DiskGenius in Post #3 shows the External USB drive OS (E:) partition is (Damaged).
Unplug any external drives that are not used to boot the computer., like the external E: drive.

In DiskGenius, Select the SPCC Solid State drive go to the toolbar to Disk/View Smart Information. If the drive is any less then Good the SSD needs to be replaced.
It looks like the External also has issues.

spunk said:

The picture of DiskGenius in Post #3 shows the External USB drive OS (E:) partition is (Damaged).
Unplug any external drives that are not used to boot the computer., like the external E: drive.

In DiskGenius, Select the SPCC Solid State drive go to the toolbar to Disk/View Smart Information. If the drive is any less then Good the SSD needs to be replaced.
It looks like the External also has issues.

The external IS the disk I'm having issues with. It's plugged into this laptop using a USB 2.5" SATA enclosure. I removed the drive from the desktop PC it was previously installed in.

Said 'damaged' partition is the one I was/am trying to repair and/or recover data from

The SPCC disk is the Silicon Power 128GB SSD installed in this laptop. The drive having issues is a Crucial MX500 1TB drive.