A recent power surge affected my PC. The SSD still appears in the BIOS, but it shows a SMART warning, and the system reports "invalid partition table" when it tries to boot. The drive contains many important files, and I didn't have a backup. Is there a safe way to recover the data?
3 Answers
You can boot the computer from a separate USB drive and try read-only recovery tools such as TestDisk or R-Studio. Ideally, image or clone the SSD first and run recovery against the image rather than the original. If the SSD disconnects, reports unusual capacity, or the software can’t read it reliably, stop and use a professional service instead.
Consumer tools such as Recuva, Disk Drill, or EaseUS may help if the problem is limited to the partition structure, but they won’t fix a failed SSD controller. Don’t initialize, format, repair, or reinstall onto the drive. Since there’s no backup and the SSD is already reporting a SMART warning, professional recovery is the safest option, although it can be costly.
Stop using the SSD immediately and don’t run repairs or write anything to it. If the files are important, the safest approach is to have a professional recovery service create a full image of the drive and work from that copy. A power surge may have damaged the controller, and repeated attempts can make recovery harder or impossible.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any backups, so I’m trying to avoid making the situation worse.