I recently had an accident with my laptop; it fell and the screen got loose. I took it to a repair shop, and they informed me that the motherboard was damaged. They suggested transferring my data to a new laptop, but I didn't have the funds for that. Instead, I bought an external hard drive and had them transfer my data to it.
Now I have two main issues: first, I'm not even sure if all my data was transferred correctly. Second, when I connect the external drive to a borrowed laptop, I can't access any of my files. I tried copying my user profile to the new laptop as I was advised, but all I see are empty files. I'm feeling completely lost and worried that I may have lost everything important. My old laptop was an ROG Z15 running Windows 10, and the borrowed laptop is on Windows 11.
2 Answers
It sounds like your old laptop had an NVMe SSD, which usually are pretty resilient. Honestly, instead of just relying on the external drive, you might want to directly remove that SSD from your old laptop. It’s surprising they didn’t suggest that. If they sold you the external drive, it raises some eyebrows about their honesty. Why not try accessing the SSD directly? You could use an adapter to plug it into your new laptop.
If the external drive is showing empty files, it might be a problem with how the data was transferred. Did the technicians clone your drive to the external one? Sometimes if they just copied files, the system files might not transfer over correctly. You could try connecting the external drive to a computer and checking its properties to see if there’s any data size shown on it. That could at least give you a hint if anything was transferred correctly.
I didn’t think to check the data size on it. I’ll definitely do that. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, I totally agree! I’ve seen NVMe drives survive crazy situations, so there’s a good chance your files are still safe on it. Just make sure to handle it carefully when you remove it!