"Boot Device Not Found"

[Brandon772]

Hi all, happy new year.

Trying to fix this issue for my grandma, who uses her PC regularly for her sewing.

Today she tried to boot and was greeted with the blue box, "boot device not found" Hard disk error 3F0.

After a short google search and doing a hard drive quick test, the pc failed the "Hard drive short DST check" with a failure code: 9k47gc-8agb04-x87t6k-60q303

She has lots of information on this PC that she would not like to risk losing and would preferably want toavoid having to restore the whole pc if possible.

Please could someone advise on next steps to be taken, many thks

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Brandon772 

That code confirms the drive is failing.

As you continue to use the drive, you're overwriting the files and folders that got erased. The more you use it, the less likely you'll be able to recover anything on it.

All you will be able to recover at best from the drive is personal data. You will not be able to recover settings, website information (including user accounts and passwords) or applications.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the disk drive from the old PC. If this is a SATA hard drive or a SATA SSD, this is a simple thing to do. If this is an m.2 SSD, that could be either screwed to the motherboard or soldered to the motherboard. If the second, you would need to have a techician remove it for you, or you risk seriously damaging the PC doing it yourself.
2) If you have a desktop PC with a spare hard drive connector, then connect the old drive to that. If the old drive is a SATA drive, connect both the power cable and the data cable. (This adapter is illustrated below) If the old drive is an m.2 SSD, you will need a USB-to-mSATA cable.

3) Try to retrieve the files and folders you want to save from the old drive and copy them to the new PC.

If this does not work, then you need to do the following:
1) Download and install this utility on a working PC
https://www.minitool.com/data-recovery-software/free-for-windows.html

2) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tool does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the demo version is free https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm