Files vanished unexpectedly – win 10
Files vanished unexpectedly – win 10
He asked me to check his laptop. It felt extremely hot once closed, but after opening it many files disappeared. The hardware appears to be functioning normally, the hard drive works correctly, data recovery attempts don’t seem to help, and other files look intact. I’m trying to figure out what could have caused this and how to retrieve the lost information.
The system may have been compromised, the drive malfunctioned, or it faced harsh environmental factors. SSDs and flash storage are vulnerable to data loss when exposed to extreme temperature fluctuations. Prolonged high temperatures could have led to data corruption, particularly if the data was still cached. I recommend checking SMART status and scanning the drive for errors. Also, verify if the drive’s lifespan has dropped significantly—full drives are more likely to experience data loss. Always scan for infections first and restrict network access to protect your devices.
SMART reports 99% health. Malwarebytes detected no issues, and the partition wizard confirmed all sectors are fine. He mentioned it felt a bit rough to the touch but didn’t damage anything, suggesting the chassis was around 50°C. He doubted it could handle deleting data and noted aggressive thermal throttling, keeping the CPU temperature low at about 70°C on the cores.
If the laptop is configured to go into standby instead of shutting down, data loss may occur because the battery may shutdown if a certain temperature threshold was reached. In such a case, it is quite possible that certain recent files got lost. With SSDs especially, loss of power is always risky. There is very little benefit in going into standby anyways unless you need to open and close the laptop every couple of minutes for some reason. Recovering data off an SSD or in general is quite tricky so that is probably not going to happen. Do you know what kind of data was lost and when it was created? Is you friend sure he didn't have the data on an external drive and then removed it by accident? Are all drives showing up on that laptop, maybe there is a secondary one that has issues? Hard to diagnose from a far.
The laptop uses a M.2 drive. Most files—PDFs, Word docs, and PowerPoint presentations—date from a few years back. I attempted to recover them using Recuva, but many recovered items couldn’t be opened. Oddly enough, some files were saved under a temporary user account rather than the admin profile. It looks like the default download folder is actually the temp account’s directory.
He handed it over due to the files, I don’t believe there’s anything he’s missing. Considering the CPU temperature reaches 70-80°C internally, is that sufficient to cause data loss?
It also appears to remove any newly created files upon a restart.
I would try to eliminate the possibility that the drive is faulty. Execute diskpart.exe via Command Prompt or PowerShell. Execute the commands shown in the screenshot. When selecting disk 0, confirm you chose the right drive if multiple are connected. Ensure Read-only is disabled and the Status displays correctly. This will either confirm or deny that the drive has been set to read-only to avoid additional data loss (due to a bad drive).
It wasn't restricted by read-only settings. I thought I understood part of the issue. It seemed like the user had a problem, so I created a new one—probably just a temporary fix (the DL folder was removed with each new log). Fixed it using the registry editor, but unfortunately it didn’t restore the files.