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I have a Dell Inspiron 7373 2-in-1 which fails to boot. The built in diagnostics which is accessed by FN-Power key says it has a failed hardrive. Most of the data is synced to the cloud - but there are a few changes which have not made it.

I can start the windows 10 advanced recovery and get to the CMD prompt where I find I am in X:. I can see the X:\USERS\Public but nothing else. Is the X: drive just a renamed boot drive where the user data is stored or is it some special partition? Is there anyway to use this X: drive to look for my Un-synched files? Is my actual user data hidden or is it on a different drive and lost?

I could not get any windows 10 OS GUI running the only boot process which I could get to work is access to the CMD prompt. The system prompts for a recovery key for many of the operations none of which work. I retrieved the key online from the windows Live acccount.

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  • X is the current recovery OS.
    – Moab
    Jun 24, 2018 at 12:14
  • You are best to remove the hard drive to perform data recovery.
    – Moab
    Jun 24, 2018 at 12:15
  • If the hard drive has suffered physical failure then the act of even powering on the drive may further damage the data stored on it and/or your ability to access it. Every moment that the drive spends running the odds of getting your data back is reduced. Data recovery is a very delicate activity and is always a race against the clock. So the first thing is to always stop accessing the drive till you know exactly what you need to do to get the data back. And the windows recovery environment is not an appropriate tool for such a task. Jun 24, 2018 at 14:42
  • As an addendum... that you can't also see a C: drive from the recovery environment indicates that the windows filesystem on the disk could not be mounted. There are a number of possible causes... but the details of what I would suggest you do next extend well beyond the limits of the question you have asked. Jun 24, 2018 at 14:47

4 Answers 4

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X: drive is for the recovery environment of windows. The C: drive contains the main OS and your personal files. The X: drive contains files to boot to the recovery environment and the recovery tools. they are kept separate so even if the main os (which in this case is Windows 10) is corrupted and cannot boot, the X: partition will allow it to boot to the recovery mode and you can do recovery of the OS from there. as for the failed hard disk, just leave it it won't work. it's too damaged already so just get a new disk or new pc and just accept the data loss. hope this helps!

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  • After all this time I now have enough knowledge to say this answer is best The X: drive is some separate Dell provided media , the C: drive was dead and so the machine booted to this media - There was no C: drive at all - and no messages but on replacement of the SSD it came back it could get windows reinstalled and then OneDrive downloaded all of the documents
    – Ross
    Aug 28, 2022 at 5:18
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The X: drive is the drive letter usually given to the WinPE OS which is a type of limited “live” version of Windows that is also used for the recovery environment.

From the perspective of the recovery environment, X: is the main drive but it is not related to your actual OS and data in any way.

Typically WinPE will mount your actual OS to C: or D: where you can perform recovery procedures.

You said, “The system prompts for a recovery key for many of the operations...” so the main OS is encrypted by BitLocker.

Because of this it is impossible to mount the drive or perform any recovery on the drive without BitLocker accepting your recovery key. If you can’t get a recovery key to work you can’t access the drive. This could be because you have the wrong recovery key, or the drive is corrupt due to damage.

Drive encryption adds a huge complication to recovering data from a failing drive.

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  • I think this is correct - It is SSD drive so I was confused how it was still booting to Windows at all with a dead SSD so I was hoping it was partially aive - but its not its booting to WindowsPE which is stored seperately
    – Ross
    Jul 11, 2018 at 3:23
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I've had this issue several times using cheap laptop hard drives. The hard drive fails to boot the OS and the disk is probably damaged, but somehow it can still do basic disk operations.

I bought an internal hard drive to usb adapter , and was able to read and copy the hard drive's contents from another computer using the same OS. They cost around $20, well worth it, just make sure the hardware is compatible with your machine. Good luck.

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  • Often times, the OS files are the only ones affected, since they tend to be read and written the most, so those sectors of the HD is most likely to fail. Once they do, they can corrupt the OS and the disk check will recognize the bad sectors, calling it a bad drive, however, it's usually just local and not going to affect the rest of the drive. Bad sectors can "grow", depending on the failure, so getting the data off soon is usually best, but it shouldn't "grow" if you aren't using the drive. Oct 9, 2019 at 21:57
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The X: drive is not the problem but your backup. It's the emergency OS as long as your main OS (on c: ?) doesn't work...

This being said you need to fix the main OS:

  • start PC and switch to command prompt
  • c:
  • cd \windows\system32\config
  • md backup
  • copy *.* backup
  • cd regback
  • dir
  • //check if DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, ... have size > 0
  • //if yes, proceed
  • copy *.* ..
  • //it says "overwrite"
  • A
  • exit //close command prompt
  • continue to Windows 10

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