Any IT Guru's able to help me with a Laptop issue

[carl hammond]

Basically my partner got a laptop about 2yrs ago and it's hardly been used.

HP Laptop, running Windows 10. Sunday she went to turn it on for the first time in about 3 months and it wook over 30 mins to load, then nothing would work once loaded and it crashed.

Turned it back on and it came up with a SELECT KEYBOARD screen, so we selected the one needed (UK) and it only offered two options Shutdown the system or proceed to factory restore the system.

Where you can factory restore it there was an advanced options bit where you can complete a backup of the system, I did this to an external hard drive hoping it would backup her photos and music files etc.

Anyway I completed the backup (32gb worth held on an external drive), done the only other option which was a factory restore of the Laptop and now it turns on fine but I am having issues.

I plugged in the drive and completed a backup restore (where it said it will restore files including photos and music etc but none of them were in the backup folders anywhere. Under Users there was nothing and nothing is visible.

So I thought maybe I had done something wrong and tried to delete the backup from the Laptop to try again and it wont even let me delete it saying it needs admin rights (but her new setup account is the only one and is Admin?

Can anyone help with this as she had a lot of memory images on there and I really need to get them back if possible.

Thanks

Carl

 

[Chewy]

First port of call should be to check if she has a Microsoft/Outlook account with the use of Onedrive, or any other email account with free cloud based storage.

Usually people enable this without knowing when they sign into their account meaning data is synced with the cloud without their knowledge.

Worth a check before you start digging any deeper.

 

[carl hammond]

First port of call should be to check if she has a Microsoft/Outlook account with the use of Onedrive, or any other email account with free cloud based storage.

Usually people enable this without knowing when they sign into their account meaning data is synced with the cloud without their knowledge.

Worth a check before you start digging any deeper.

Thanks mate, how do we know if she has as I deff don't and have no idea how this would work :-/

 

[Chewy]

Thanks mate, how do we know if she has as I deff don't and have no idea how this would work :-/

On the off chance she has this on Outlook/Hotmail, Sign into the account via your browser of choice, once logged in, top left hand corner there's an Icon that's 9 smalls squares, click on that and this should reveal the application tiles, Onedrive will be in here.

It'll Launch Onedrive in a new tab, and here's were any potential files will be shown. It's a slim chance but worth checking.

 

[aleksboch]

I would take the disk out of the laptop and plug it into a working PC and try to recover the files from it that way.

 

[carl hammond]

On the off chance she has this on Outlook/Hotmail, Sign into the account via your browser of choice, once logged in, top left hand corner there's an Icon that's 9 smalls squares, click on that and this should reveal the application tiles, Onedrive will be in here.

It'll Launch Onedrive in a new tab, and here's were any potential files will be shown. It's a slim chance but worth checking.

Thanks mate will try this but think she only have gmail now and closed her Hotmail years ago :-( but not harm in trying, thanks

I would take the disk out of the laptop and plug it into a working PC and try to recover the files from it that way.

Could it still hold the files after being restored to factory settings? thanks

 

[aleksboch]

Could it still hold the files after being restored to factory settings? thanks

This could be a problem, assuming the disk was 'wiped' or 'formatted' during a factory reset.

Easy answer is no.

Difficult answer is maybe. You might have a chance recovering data from this disk by using a program like r-studio or testdisk, but you would have to remove the hdd and plug it into a different computer.

 

[Chewy]

This could be a problem, assuming the disk was 'wiped' or 'formatted' during a factory reset.

Easy answer is no.

Difficult answer is maybe. You might have a chance recovering data from this disk by using a program like r-studio or testdisk, but you would have to remove the hdd and plug it into a different computer.

Unless I've misunderstood, the laptop is booting into the OS post reset. So I don't believe he'll have to mess around swapping the HDD into another machine or a caddy.

As long as the disk hasn't been formatted (As you've already suggested) and the old partition is still available, the recovery software should still be able to read it?

Carl,

Google accounts have the same feature, It's called 'Drive' (Usually comes with 15GB of free storage) so again might be worth checking there too.

 

[carl hammond]

Unless I've misunderstood, the laptop is booting into the OS post reset. So I don't believe he'll have to mess around swapping the HDD into another machine or a caddy.

As long as the disk hasn't been formatted (As you've already suggested) and the old partition is still available, the recovery software should still be able to read it?

Carl,

Google accounts have the same feature, It's called 'Drive' (Usually comes with 15GB of free storage) so again might be worth checking there too.

Thanks mate I will have a look, the only option after creating a backup on the external drive was a factory reset of the laptop so hope this has not formatted it but if so then so be it as we had no other option, Damn windows 10, neither rof us like it and I would prefer another operating system be installed on it if it's data has been lost.

IT is clearly not my thing lol

 

[carl hammond]

Thanks for all the advise and help guys, I had to admit defeat and luckily my brother-in-law does a lot of IT stuff on systems and he managed to fix it all, he said it wasn't easy as it was something that happened recently to my sisters business laptop, it was a corrupt backup and a fault in the windows update that caused it all.

Somehow (no idea how) he managed to get everything back which I have not backup up on a spare external HD...

 

[aleksboch]

magic!