Drive is locked! I'm desperate....

Hello guys, I just registered because i have no solution for my situation...

I'll try to describe in detail what happened to my hard drive, where I have all my info and have no backup...

i had an ssd removed from Zenbook and installed in Sony Vaio (120 GB, 2.5 gb free for now, of most crucial information, kid's photos, music library, my work for 2 years...). My Vaio was getting a bit old so decided to get replacement and leave this one to my wife. I bought used Vaio, newer model which had just sata hdd.
And here I decided to swap the drives. I put my ssd to newer laptop, and it started some automatic repairs. When windows booted, most apps were not accessible and some other stuff was messy too.

Well this newer Vaio had some cooling problems so i returned this laptop to seller, with its original hdd, and when i put my ssd to my older Vaio, it did the same repair thing, but i expected that it would boot in normal state with all the apps functioning as before. But the files still were inaccessible.

I left this laptop for short period of time and went to buy another one, as i got the refund from the seller. I got home, and thought to install all required software and make backup and copy files from ssd to new laptop, to fix both laptops together. When i turned on my old Vaio, the blue screen appeared and said that windows crashed and i needed recovery tools or something. after that, i removed ssd and tried to use it as external drive to copy my files, connected with usb. The drive appeared but was inaccessible, even didn't show me the capacity of drive.

Then I tried to instal windows as upgrade option to keep my files. It wrote that drive was locked.
I tried to instal windows as fresh, but it said that i had not enough storage on drive (i have 2.5 gigs of free memory).
I tried to repair windows, still drive is locked message appears.
I tried startup repair - no luck
Tried disklist (or smth..) tutorial
Tried ckdsk tutorial
Tried bootrec, nothing helps.

Please advice me how to get my data, its just most important data... and it happened right before i tried to backup fils...

Thanx in advance

First of all, Windows can't be transferred from one laptop to another. If you switch SSD/HDD, Windows need to be re-installed from scratch. Running "Startup Repair" or "CHKDSK" won't make the OS working on a completely new hardware.

Then I tried to instal windows as upgrade option to keep my files. It wrote that drive was locked.
I tried to instal windows as fresh, but it said that i had not enough storage on drive (i have 2.5 gigs of free memory).

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2.5 GB is not enough space so re-installing is also not an option. Connecting the SSD as a slave drive via USB and transferring data to the new laptop is the first thing you should do.

i removed ssd and tried to use it as external drive to copy my files, connected with usb. The drive appeared but was inaccessible, even didn't show me the capacity of drive.

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Probably the USB enclosure might be faulty. Cheap enclosures are not reliable at all. They sometime work and sometime not. Make sure to buy a good quality one with generally positive reviews.

To make sure the SSD is working and your data still accessible, connect the SSD to a direct SATA port of a laptop/desktop and boot the system using a "Linux" CD like "Puppy".

http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-slacko-5.7/slacko-5.7.0-PAE.iso

If you can browse the partitions and access data, it will be the enclosure which is faulty.

Then I tried to instal windows as upgrade option to keep my files. It wrote that drive was locked.
I tried to instal windows as fresh, but it said that i had not enough storage on drive (i have 2.5 gigs of free memory).

Click to expand...

I just mentioned that installing windows wasn't an option for me. Sorry for bad English...

Probably the USB enclosure might be faulty. Cheap enclosures are not reliable at all. They sometime work and sometime not. Make sure to buy a good quality one with generally positive reviews.

Click to expand...

I completely agree, but I'm not sure that this was an issue of enclosure, because all of my other ssd-s and hdd-s worked well. When I connected the drive, it showed all partitions and let me access other partitions, but for the windows partition it said that it was not accessible.


Anyways, I followed your recommendations and I accessed my files, copied them to another hdd and saved them! You saved my life! Thank you so much, I can't be happier!

All files of any importance need at least one backup copy. Files of "most crucial information" would warrant at least 2 backup copies. There are many ways files can be lost and you need to be prepared when (not if) something happens. This is the only way to ensure the safety of your data.

Having no backups is asking for trouble.