Question: Hi guys.
My laptop (Dell XPS 13) won’t boot – stop code critical process died. I didn’t get a chance to back up and it wouldn’t let me enter even in safe mode to do that. It’s basically in a loop. The only option it gives me is to restore it.
I took it to a repair center where they booted it to an external Windows 10, cloned the hard drive and backed it up to an external hard drive. They said it had no problems cloning.
Before I restore my laptop, I plugged in my external hard drive into a friend’s laptop to make sure everything is in there. I could see OS files and folders such as Documents, Download, Music, etc but these were all empty. No personal files.
I think this is maybe a permission issue but what do I do next? Are all the files technically there but I just need to take ownership? Or does my laptop hard drive need to be cloned again with different instructions? I would appreciate any advice as I’m desperate to get these files back.
Thank you
Zahab
Answer:
That’s interesting. I can enter the folders under ‘Service Plus’ but they’re just empty. I don’t see any other folders that could have been my original account.
My hard drive was encrypted with BitLocker. I did give them the recovery key – but I’m not sure if they ever used it. Could this have lead to not having my original account cloned?
If at all possible, take the external thing AND your laptop back to that repair center, and have them show you in person that the files actually exist.
Don’t do any ‘reset’ on the laptop until you visually verify your data exists on that external.