I recently encountered a "Boot Device Not Found" error on my laptop. My laptop has two internal hard drives, and this error popped up on my C drive, which only has my operating system and some important files I really need to keep. After troubleshooting and eventually taking it to a repair shop, they told me the hard drive itself is fine, but the operating system was somehow completely wiped off. They mentioned this might be happening more often lately due to BIOS updates or similar issues, which is unsettling because I could lose valuable files. I'm curious if there's a way to recover some of my data. I plan to take out the hard drive and use a SATA to USB cable to connect it to my desktop, hoping I can retrieve some files. What other options do I have?
2 Answers
Since you’ve got two drives in your laptop and your important data is on the second drive, you might be in luck! Using a SATA-to-USB adapter is a good idea. You could also try booting your laptop from a recovery USB stick or a lightweight Linux distribution to see if it can recognize the internal disks. If your second drive is intact, copying your data to an external drive should be straightforward.
If you're able to boot up Windows through a different drive or PC, there are programs that can help you recover your lost data, unless it's been overwritten. Just remember, files aren’t actually deleted until something else replaces them on the same sector of the drive. If you haven't installed Windows on it again yet, you should be able to get most, if not all, of your files back.
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