Well if it isn't my old friend chkdsk /r
So my sis comes to me with a broken laptop. It boots, but then it doesn't boot... that is, it gets to the Windows boot screen, but ends up on a black screen with a mouse cursor and that's it. This is a symptom of MANY possible scenarios, worst case being the partition has gone raw, which is what happened here.
I could either use file recovery software like EaseUS, or let chkdsk /r repair and restore the partition. Use the latter if it lets you, and in my case, it does... sometimes it won't let you, but since chkdsk did recognize that this was indeed an NTFS partition, it will work. Don't let the ETA scare you, it's not real... once it gets past the damage, the rest of the drive will be pretty quick. Example:
1% in 1 day! I'm quite impressed. Last time this happened it took 3, nearly 4 days to arrive at 1%. Once it's restored, backup is mandatory. No excuses people! Gigabytes are CHEAP these days!!! 4TB for $99!!!! Heck, backup your backups! We're at that point now where anyone can afford this.
First milestone!
Several hours after posting, it made a nice fat jump! While still on stage 1, it's quite a leap. Again, these scans (on heavily damaged drives) have been known to last a week.
Restarted, but more progress
About 5 days ago, someone accidentally shut off the PC while attempting to turn it on. Makes a whole lotta sense huh... well here's the new progress. We're at 25% (still on Stage 1) in 5 days. It doesn't help that this is an external 1TB drive on a "purported" USB 3.0 connection via Fantom Drive housing. I'm actually considering cancelling the scan and hooking it up to a SATA port instead.
One thing worries me about that though. If I turn on the PC with the drive hooked in, it most certainly will not boot because Windows will have a hard time detecting it. I could try to enable "hot swap" in the BIOS and simply plug it in after Windows has booted. I'm going to assume that I should have the drive plugged into the PSU first, boot up into windows, then plug in the SATA connector after and hope Windows detects it, otherwise I'll have thrown out another 5 days of progress... but if it works, it will most certainly cut approximately 2/5 the scan time (because I can't verify that this external enclosure is even cooperating...)
Captain's Log... 5-24-2019
Here's the update in case the visitors are curious. I know a lot of you don't have steemit accounts, so you can't really comment/vote, but the visitors analytics shows I'm doing pretty well x) Thanks viewers. The scan is still ongoing. Wish us luck!
Final Log
I believe it has been at least 25 days since the scan. I left off at 37%, however something quite interesting appeared:
Now mind you, I do have to be moving around the 6th and I've had to shut down, but the above strings I do recall being a "good sign"... there's "modifying" going on, despite it being stage 1. Immediately, plugged the drive into a SATA port via hotplug, low and behold, the drive is no longer raw.
I have begun copying files from the drive to a stable backup. I am very much satisfied with the outcome. I would say "Patience" is something that pays off, and I've had a LOT of it to get this far. Well done... well done.