Late Tuesday night I was up late working on uploading some videos to Spotify. I noticed that Windows was Forcing me to update. No ability to pause, thanks Microsoft, and so I decided to wrap up what I was doing (the tabs would be saved anyways right?), and then let update do its thing while I slept.
I woke up about 8:10, pressed power on my PC, and went to go grab my coffee.
I come back and windows would not boot, like at all, and even trying to get into BIOS was a hassle. Windows defaulted to trying to go into recovery mode, and I couldn't even enter via Safe Mode. At this point I knew something catastrophic happened.
Not 100% sure even now what it was, perhaps the update got interrupted by sleep or a shutdown, something. In any case the computer was inoperable, and I was struggling to even get it to Post (basically turn on for those who aren't techies).
My next thought was my DATA! Oh no, what do I do???
Now I am a techie, I've been building PC's since I was a young lad, and I have played with operating systems a lot. So it isn't like I'm incapable. Although my main PC was just not working in any way, even to recover. Thus the next option is to take the drive out and try it with another PC.
By the end of the day I pulled out 3 other computers (don't ask me why I have so many haha, one of them was my old main pc). My laptop had windows on it, so I hooked up the drive, and tried to see if I could pull or scrape the data off.
Sadly it was encrypted, and for those who know: It wasn't actually encrypted with Bitlocker surprisingly (although I didn't turn it on anyway), but it was locked for some reason.
No matter what I tried it wouldn't let me into the folders to see the files.
My Life Philosophy
At this point I want to panic, I want to get upset, and to be honest I want to cry. This was all out of nowhere, and I had a full day planned of work to get done.
However I told myself that wouldn't help me, and if I wanted to fix this problem I needed to stay logical and stoic. So I did.
I reminded myself many times to stay focused and locked in, as it was important for me not to make any mistakes. Although I did make a few, and luckily my uncle talked me down from the ledge if you will.
From the morning to afternoon I was working straight through, skipping lunch even, so that I could work on it. By that point some desperation started slipping in, but he got me to take a step back and leave. Clear my head.
What did I do??
So the issue is that I can't access the data on the drive right? What can you do, well there are some ways to unlock them in windows, and there are other ways in Linux. I happened to have another PC lying around that was blank, so I installed Zorin Linux (the distro I have most experience with), and started getting to work on decrpyting the drive.
Trying things like Dislocker, and such.
I tried the command line on both windows AND linux, which is beyond my level of knowledge. However I was desperate, and so I learned.
I used Perplexity.AI to help me a LOT during all of this, so another prime example of using AI in important situations.
However no matter what I tried to do to unlock it, it seems like it was all for naught. Later my uncle brought up the idea of putting the drive IN a PC, rather than just hooking it up externally.
I had my old main pc, and so I tried it. Managed to get semi-logged in, and into windows somehow. From there I could finally see my data, and I was able to scrape it off onto a backup drive. I immediately also backed up my Obsidian Vault to my laptop as well.
This vault being part of my life's work, all of my journals, notes, content I produce, books I want to read (a list and a bunch of epubs), and everything else for myself. Like my life plans or how to swim book, is all on there.
It was heartbreaking to maybe have to come to the realization that I may have lost them. I did have a backup, but it was from like a month ago, which there has been a lot added since then. I've just been so busy with working on other things, that I hadn't backed up it recently.
In the end I was able to get it all pretty much off of the drive, I then installed Linux, and then windows just to make sure the drive was completely clear (also was toying with the idea of sticking to just linux as my main haha).
They always say have 3 backups of your data. On an external hard drive, on the cloud, and on a drive outside of your location.
