Missing documents on father in laws computer drive

The clone.
Yes, the system, OS, and Recovery partitions.

Goliath100 said:

MS did and update and I had done some clean up on his system. I restarted and it will not boot. Tried reset. Tried to reinstall with media and would not do so and keep files.
I had also run MSconfig and checked marked for processors and max memory. As it always has started really slow.

Pulled the drive out to pull data off to wipe it and start over. Able to get all I wanted except Documents.
Can't find them on the drive. Looked on "c:" which became "J:" when using a usb adapter.
Under his User: Documents and Settings access denied.
Under My Documents no access.

He is 89 and doing his life story and it was all in there. Thankfully he prints most everything. We are talking 3" binders so should be a lot of info.

First of all if the drive in question has Data on it you do not have backups on.......... STOP using it with windows.

Now a question.
you mention it stopped working after an update(I'm guessing a windows update).. this is common as it is win10 we talking about.
Did you try to use windows restore point to remove the latest update, with the windows installer and click "Repair Computer"
Then this guide "option one" will appear after you click "Repair computer" System Restore Windows 10

as for the other part about changing permissions and stuff.. Dont do that, there is a much easier way.
Go to Home - Linux Mint and Download the ISO for Linux Mint21 Then use Rufus 3.21 Portable Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way and create a live Linux USB stick..
Boot the computer with that Linux USB live testing and then you can connect the external drive and read the disk without writing any data to the disk (windows always write data to external disks) and use Linux Mint file-manager to copy the data from the drive.. Linux dont give a damn about windows permissions it reads it all as long its not encrypted with bitlocker

If there is deleted files that you want to restore. then it becomes another topic. and then its really important not to write any new data to the disk.

Using a couple of restore programs I was able to glean most of the documents. The failed MS Reset (keeping documents and files option...) caused the removal of the document file/folder.

I had tried several restore points and they failed. This was before the attempted reset.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Photorec is a okay free program for recovering lost files PhotoRec - CGSecurity
SSD's is the worst drives to recover files from as trim destroys deleted data.

edit
PhotoRec Step By Step - CGSecurity

Goliath100 said:

Using a couple of restore programs I was able to glean most of the documents. The failed MS Reset (keeping documents and files option...) caused the removal of the document file/folder.

I had tried several restore points and they failed. This was before the attempted reset.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Examining the shadow copy you can reveal things in there that have subsequently been deleted.

The system restore program only restores some of the things in a shadow copy.

shadowcopyview is very useful for that. ShadowCopyView - Shadow copy viewer for Windows 10/8/7/Vista

yes , I always include it my pe builds.