My Experience With Data Loss (Windows Edition)
What I did when I saw this.
Introduction
A few days ago, after a reboot, the F drive on my PC failed to be opened.
It has been a few months since my last article on my experience with dataloss on MacOS, so I viewed this as a great opportunity to experience the recovery features on Microsoft Windows.
Health of the Disk
The first thing I did was use CrystalDiskInfo to check the SMART status of the disk to try and understand if it could be a hardware problem.
From what I can tell there is nothing physically wrong with the disk.
I then checked to see what the drive looked like in Disk Management. When opening Disk Management, I found that it took around ~10 minutes to get this view of the drive. Everything was feeling very laggy as well.
When Disk Management loaded I was able to see that Windows was having trouble seeing anything about the disk. The name of the disk wasn’t read, and it couldn’t get the amount of free/used space on the drive. It was able to tell that it was still BitLocker Encrypted which leads to one of the weirder things that was happening.
Weird Behaviors
At the same time I was doing all of this, I kept getting popups that the encryption on Disk F: was paused at 100.0%. This was a little concerning, because I didn’t want BitLocker to try and mess with the encryption of the disk in this failed state, but thankfully that wouldn’t happen. I can say this popup was just a meaningless red herring, and it can be safely ignored.
Steps to Recovery
To recover the disk I used the Windows utility chdsk. This utility comes with windows and is a very powerful tool for repairing corrupted filesystems on Windows.
From an Elevated CMD prompt I just ran.
chkdsk F:This Command just checks the disk for errors, but it doesn’t fix them. I did this, because I didn’t know what was wrong with the disk, and I didn’t want chkdsk to make any changes to the disk at first.
After a little bit, chdsk told me there were errors with the disk.
To fix the errors I ran.
chkdsk F: /rThe /r allows chkdsk to apply fixes and mark bad sectors.
This entire command took a little over 17 hours to complete on the hard drive. It varies based on the speed and size of the drive. I had it run overnight.
Conclusion
After Running chkdsk I was able to mount the F: drive, and this is what it looked like in Disk Management.
The drive was now visible, and I was able to open it and see all my files. Also Disk Management opened instantly this time. The lagging was clearly due to the disk corruption.
Overall I only lost a day of time using my PC, and this wasn’t as crazy an experience as my last article.
Before you leave
Resources I used to guide me on chkdsk use.
Thanks a lot for reading!
Aaron
