Data recovery with no partition?

I have a one week old new SSD installed on a windows laptop.  During a normal day of usage, I lost access to the drive (will say folder not accessible).  After a restart, the parition on this drive is gone.  It is a 2tb ssd with 40% full.  I see a lot of disk recovery tool needs a partition to work.  Are there ones that don't?  And if I setup a new partition on the drive, will I still be able to recover data from it?  And what (free if possible) tools are recommended? Laptop is on windows 10.

If this isn't the boot drive post an image of Disk Management showing the drive.

You might be able to recover the data with a program called Testdisk.

After running Testdisk, the missing partition magically re appear and am able to access the files.  However, is there a way to figure out what went wrong before? I ran windows chkdsk on the ssd and reported no error.  But before that when the drive fails, I could not even run chkdsk on it, with the following error.  Basically looking for a way to ensure this drive will be reliable going forward.

checkDisk will work now with drive: D:
D:\ Volume Label: DATA_2TB, File System: NTFS
The first NTFS boot sector is unreadable or corrupt.
Reading second NTFS boot sector instead.
All NTFS boot sectors are unreadable or corrupt.  Cannot continue.
Check Disk: Unable to Finish
Check Disk Failed

Usually the partition disappears because the MFT or partition table gets corrupted. Testdisk attempts to recover the partition table. I'm not sue why check disk would fail unless it was because the partition was missing. Check disk cannot run on a RAW drive but this doesn't appear to be your case as check disk did run but said the drive was corrupt.

I would backup any data that is not backed up and run a diagnostic on the drive. If the drive shows up as bad I would RMA it. What is the manufacturer of the drive.

Edited by JohnC_21, 21 July 2023 - 08:36 AM.

Is there a way to verify the health of the MFT or partition table?  I ran the following chkdsk command and I am wondering if it is sufficient to say the drive is in good shape?

D:\>chkdsk d: /f /r /x
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.
Volume dismounted.  All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
Volume label is DATA_2TB.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
  137216 file records processed.
File verification completed.
 Phase duration (File record verification): 936.20 milliseconds.
  184 large file records processed.
 Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.00 milliseconds.
  0 bad file records processed.
 Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.43 milliseconds.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
  30019 reparse records processed.
  259976 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
 Phase duration (Index verification): 1.32 seconds.
  0 unindexed files scanned.
 Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 68.47 milliseconds.
  0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
 Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 0.49 milliseconds.
  30019 reparse records processed.
 Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 69.78 milliseconds.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
 Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 1.43 milliseconds.
  61380 data files processed.
 Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 0.29 milliseconds.

Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters in user file data ...
  137200 files processed.
File data verification completed.
 Phase duration (User file recovery): 10.86 minutes.

Stage 5: Looking for bad, free clusters ...
  319591164 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
 Phase duration (Free space recovery): 0.00 milliseconds.

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

2000380927 KB total disk space.
 721724236 KB in 73571 files.
     27800 KB in 61382 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    264231 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
1278364660 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 500095231 total allocation units on disk.
 319591165 allocation units available on disk.
Total duration: 10.90 minutes (654399 ms).

D:\>

That indicates the drive has no system file corruption but I would still do the drive diagnostics. SSD manufacturers usually have their own utility to check the drive.

I used the manfactuer diagnostic tool (adata ssd toolbox) to run a full scan of the drive, it only took 1 min and it claims everything is ok.  Is there a better tool to check? I was expecting it will take longer than a minute to do. 

What is the manufacturer of the SSD?

Adata

This is the tool recommended by the manufacturer

https://www.adata.com/us/support/downloads/

I would run that tool and check the drive. Do the quick diagnostic. If it passes do the Full diagnostic.

Already ran and no errors were dectected.  But the full diagnostic only took 1 min.  Don't have alot of confidence on it.

Edited by wzfoto, 22 July 2023 - 08:19 AM.

Does HDTune also say the drive is good. If yes then I would say you are good to go but always backup data as when a SSD goes it goes off like a light bulb.

You can try HDTune for 15 days without paying.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

Another diagnostic software is GsmartControl

https://gsmartcontrol.shaduri.dev/screenshots

Both tools reported no errors.  I suppose this ssd can still be used.

Yes, you should be good to go but always create backups of data you cannot afford to lose.

Hi,

Check if there is any new firmware update for the SSD and also that the Laptop BIOS is also updated.