Very strange Hard Drive fault

[smr]

Hi,

I've not come across this problem before in around 25-30 years of working with Computers.

An all in one acer developed a fault whereby the computer was working fine and then all of a sudden shut down. Turned it back on, black screen, no power, nothing... okay, did some diagnostics - faulty motherboard or something of that ilk - beyond repair anyway.

Pulled the 2.5" SATA Hard Drive out of it to extract data from. Plugged it into my computer and it just showed one folder - Video shortcut - which is actually just a shortcut to the video folder on my computer.

So I did show hidden files etc. and it shows about 4 other system folders, no trace of Windows or user accounts etc.

Ran it through easeus datarecovery and a deep scan took several hours - returned a file structure which seemed to be up to around 2017 but although it showed directories, it didn't 'fetch' any of the data within them - just showing blank except for one or two files per folder.

Is this a massive virus attack or something ? I've tried everything I can think of and I can't understand it - I've never seen a machine die like that and wipe all the contents of a hard drive, at least the visible contents which don't require a deep scan.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[darael]

What partitions are shown and are any of them hidden?

 

[The Old School Gamer]

We see corrupted file systems / drives in bad health all the time.
Depends how far gone they are to what can be recovered with software apps.
Sometimes a scan disk can repair the file system enough to grab a user directory.

But I have literally had drives fail on me in the middle of a external hardware clone... walk back in the workshop to click, click, click, transfer speed to 0.0Kb/s.

That is never a good phone call to make (bet you wished you had backed your precious files up now ah).

 

[mrk]

Check in disk management (via right click start button) as you will probably find the original partitions have drive letters that conflict with your host OS so disk management parks them. You can change the drive letter of them from there and browse the folders normally.