[Ken Hutchison]

1. When I turn my Dell XPS-8700 (Windows 7 professional 64-bit) on, the only thing that happens is five beeps, a short quiet interval, 5 more beeps, etc. Nothing at all appears on the screen. When I put a CD or DVD in the DVD drive and restarted it nothing happened.
I had been running Checkdisk on my external 2TB drive J, when it stopped at 74% of checking indexes. I waited an hour or so, and 74% did not change. I turned the computer off and back on with the power button, and that is when the problem started.
I am writing from a borrowed (Windows 10) computer now. I suspect that I have to take the C drive out of the non-functioning computer, put it in an external USB case, and run a recovery program on it on the borrowed computer. If that is true, what should I use? Recuva? Would it even see the drive? If I put an internal drive in an external USB case and Explorer does not see or detect it, are there other programs I can get that will see it?

2. I have a new external 5TB USB Seagate drive. I have Carbonite for Drive C (Internal Drive D died years ago, and Carbonite will not back up external drives without an additional charge). I also have iDrive, which has 49,000+ data files from both C and J. As long as I am on another computer temporarily, should I partition the new 5TB drive before I download the two sets of backed-up files or do something else? If so, can I partition a drive that already has files on it?

3. I unplugged the external drive that Checkdisk was running on when everything froze and plugged it into this borrowed computer. The drive opened in Explorer, but under This PC the normally blue bar for showing the amount of the disk that is used (in Explorer) is red. What does that mean? I think that at first it showed about 74% of the space used on that drive, but now it shows the amount of space used that it had before, which is about 96%. I am in the process of copying all of the files from the previous Drive J the new 5TB drive. (I think at least one of the USB ports is USB 2.0, so the process is taking about three full days.) After the copying is finished, would it be advisable to do error checking in Explorer?

[TeamKomando:John]

Hello Ken,

All great questions, data recovery is something I am quite familiar with.

A1. 5 beeps from a Dell, is generally bad CMOS battery, might be worth replacing the CMOS battery. Here is a write up from Dell community.

The fact that your chkdsk process has hung at 74% reflects A) you disk is faulty B) You have massive data corruption. It is never a good idea to interrupt a chkdsk in process as you further risk data corruption, I have waited up to 24 hours for a chkdsk process to finalize.

If you have already placed your old internal disk into an external hard drive enclosure and nothing is popping up then you have lost your partition tables.
If you truly care about or require any of the data on this disk then I highly recommend professional data recovery as you are risking it all attempting recovery yourself.

If you choose to attempt data recovery yourself you can try using Test Disk, which I have successfully rebuilt lost partitions in the past with. Here is a step by step guide on recovering an NTFS partition along with individual files Here you can download the program.

If you are able to restore you lost partitions, then immediately start working on getting your data off of that drive.

A2. While there is not need to partition the disk to restore 2 sets of backup data (could use two folders to separate) You can partition a disk with data on it buy using a third party program, here is a write up on it. However you risk losing all data if you make a mistake.

A3. The red bar indicates that your disk is almost full

Best of luck, let us know how it goes.

[Ken Hutchison]

The battery worked! However, there are other problems, which I will ask later.

[Author]

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