Failed Drive on Laptop preventing it from booting - reinstall W10?

lotrfan1 · 09 Apr 2021

I have a question regarding the recent suspected internal hard disk (HDD not SDD) failure of my Windows 10 laptop. That hard disk contains Windows 10. At present, the laptop will not boot at all. Here is a bit of background on the problem and what I have done to date. After that I pose a few options for my next best step. I would be grateful for any advice.

The laptop is a Toshiba Dynabook A55 (i5 with 8 mg RAM ) running Windows 10 Home 64 bit Build 19041.867. It is up to date regarding Windows updates. It is rigorously scanned on a daily basis with McAfee and HitmanPro.

When the failure occurred, I was using the laptop and scanning through my emails. It froze. I tried a reboot and it failed. It then restarted itself and failed again.

I went into Windows Repair>Cmd Prompt>DISKPART to see that no volumes, etc could be recognized on the disk.

I created a USB boot drive via the Creation Tool. I adjusted the bootmenu to boot off of that drive first. DISKPART now shows several volumes available as follows:

Volume 0, Letter E, DVD, Size 0
Volume 1, Letter C, Filetype RAW, Partition, 1843GB size
Volume 2 with just the information RAW and 1600MB in size
Volume 3 with just the information RAW and 17GB in size
Volume 4 with just the information RAW and 260GB in size
Volume 5 Letter D Filetype FAT32 and 28GB in size

All volumes show a status of Healthy. It looks like Volume 1 is my old C drive. At present, I do not know what Volumes 2, 3, and 4 are.

Before I can do sfc /scannow, dism, chkdsk, etc., I believe I need to change Volume 1 from RAW to NTFS.

Option 1.) Could one use DISKPART to switch RAW to NTFS with there being a slight chance the data would be retained. If it worked and C: was accessible again, I could do sfc /scannow etc. I do not know how reliable of a state C: would be in using this option …but is it worth a shot or a pointless exercise?

Option 2.) Do a reinstall of Windows 10 using the USB Boot disk? Old C drive would be gone and I would have to reinstall all of my apps, etc.

Option 3.) Something else?

Thanks for reading this and thanks in advance for any guidance.

dalchina · 09 Apr 2021

Hi, you need to check the disk first.
Boot your PC from a live boot disk such as Gandalf's - one including e.g. Crystal Diskinfo

Run Crystal Diskinfo and see what it reports about your disk.

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Do you have a disk image of your Windows partitions? Endlessly recommended here so you can recover quickly and relatively easily when your system disk is corrupt of fails. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free). If not, lesson learnt, I guess.