Help recovering dat on an ASUS Laptop I can't open
So, a friend of mine asked for help recovering data from his ASUS M5406KA Laptop which all of a sudden boots straight into BIOS, where no bootable devices are listed.
The laptop is still covered by warranty, but he's afraid the store will just fresh install windows thus losing important files. This also means I can't disassemble it to access the 1T drive physically as that would mean voiding the warranty.
Since I had previous success recovering files from a (supposedly) dead SSD of mine I tried the same approach here, as follows:
- Installed OpenSuperClone Live on a USB Flash Drive using Rufus
- Cloned the laptops SSD using Generic Source Device mode (Drive wasn't listed when choosing a source device otherwise)
- Realised the SSD I had available to be a destination of the image was about 24gb too small (Had to connect it via USB because I cant open the Laptop)
- Tried running DMDE on the partial image anyways, but only got system files
- Since OSC found 0 bad sectors during the cloning, tried running DMDE straight through OSC Live on the Laptop, with the same result.
What should I do?
EDIT: Turns out before asking me for help he asked a few friends, who "Tried reinstalling windows but couldn't because it wasn't compatible". Could the windows installer have full formated the disk, leaving only these files behind from the failed installation?
TLDR: Laptop will only boot into BIOS, Drive aparently has 0 bad sectors but running DMDE only recovers system files.