HP Spectre x360 faulty USBC charging then hard drive issue

[OshTash]

My HP Spectre x360 Convertible is just over two years old and both charging ports gradually stopped recognizing the charger (I had to position the cord "just so" to get the charging light on). But they've both now completely stopped recognizing, and my computer won't turn on.

After taking it to multiple repair shops (and being told there's no way to fix it) I asked them if they could transfer the hard drive to a brand-new HP Spectre x360 Convertible. It is the same exact model as mine but it is my sister's pc, she never even opened it because her job gave her a computer to use instead. But to my horror, I was told the data on the hard drive was no longer "accessible". I tried multiple shops and they can't retrieve anything off it. Does anyone have an explanation or advice?

The data and files are precious to me. I am just finishing a 7-year PhD, and although most of my files were backed up to the cloud, some were not. Now I am considering sending the hard drive out to experts in CA which will cost a small fortune that I do not have.

Thanks in advance.

[WAWood]

There are different forms of accessibility -- and what you are being told is only PARTIALLY correct.

When you have a Windows PC, you have a user account on it, and even though you might name that account "Bob" (for example), Windows does not use that name; instead, it generates a hash code from that name and uses that.  Then, all the files that "Bob" saves to their default account location are protected against access by anyone who is not "Bob".

This is done so that several folks can use the same PC, for example, a whole family, and each user account has files that the other user accounts can not see or access -- privacy, in effect.

And even if you have another PC, and you also have a "Bob" account on that PC, it does not have the same INTERNAL name as the "Bob" account on this PC. So, if you take a USB stick to that PC and copy the "Bob" account files to it, and then copy them to your PC, SURPRISE -- you will NOT be able to access them -- because they are different "Bob" accounts.

So that part of denying access is correct.

That said, any computer repair shop that is even worth spending time in, will have utilities that work around these limitations.  I do not run such a repair shop, but I have utilities on USB stick that allow me access to any and all files that are not on an encrypted drive or file system.  So, I can see both sets of "Bob" files -- even if I am not "Bob".  I am surprised they did not do this for you.

The user accounts are contained  ENTIRELY on the primary drive, so moving a drive from one PC to another is the same as transferring the accounts from one PC to another.  If the PCs are the same model, they will use the same drivers, so the drive from PC #1 should boot and run OK in PC $2 -- but realize it will have the user accounts from PC #1.  But if you have access to those accounts, you will still have access to the PC.

To complicate matters further, drives can become corrupted so their filesystems can no longer be read by Windows.  I had this happen very recently on a Win10 desktop I use from time to time.  But a quick way to deal with that is to buy GetDataBack from Runtime software.  It used to cost around $50 and will do a search for all the files and folders still on the drive and will present you with a filemanager kind of tool that you can do to recover any of those files and folders and copy them to your drive.  I highly recommend it as I have used it time and time again to restore drives where "All the files were lost!"  (Or so I was told)

[OshTash]

First, thank you so much for taking the time to give such a thorough response. I really, really appreciate it!

So I think the repair shops knew about the “necessary permissions to access the drive” issue (one of them mentioned it) but neither shop brought it up when I picked up the computer, so I assumed it wasn’t an issue after all- but I’ll doublecheck tomorrow. The first repair shop gave me a paper that said the issue was the “GUID Partition Table (GPT) Protective Partition”, that it had bad compatibility or was corrupted, and there was nothing to be done.

I'm worried that someone from Geeksquad accidentally messed up the hard drive when I tried them first… because initially I went to Geeksquad with just the USB-c port issue (which I now know is very common with this laptop and requires either a couple chip or motherboard replacement to fix). But nobody on the forums has mentioned having issues with disappearing or corrupted data afterward. And the second repair shop said “it looks like all the data files may have been deleted”…  -_- *sigh*

I googled the GetDataBack tool, and although it sounds great, I have no clue what I’m doing and it looks pretty intimidating. I currently have one busted computer with the hard drive taken out, sitting in a zip lock bag, and I’m too scared to try to switch it with my sister’s pc hard drive. Sadly, I’m likely going to end up sending it to the DriveSavers company in CA. It will cost a fortune but I’d rather be safe with that data.