Take the old hard rive to a certified computer repair store and they might be able to get everything you had on that hard drive back. Happened to me once and that is what I did and I got all the lost stuff.
Was any of it stored on Microsoft’s One Drive Cloud drive?
To early to tell. You may just have a bad hard drive controller. Your configuration can ‘forget’ a drive etc. I’m not techie so you’ll probably get better answers but what I did was pull the hard drive out and put it in a $15 external hard drive case and connected that (now) external drive to a different computer to retrieve any files before burying the evidence. Yeah...I got lucky. Best of luck to you.
By the way you might have considered switching to a MacBook Air. I did 2 1/2 years ago and never looked back. Much easier to deal with and constant iCloud backup.
Regular backing-up of your files is your friend.
Hopefully a qualified technician can retrieve your information.
You should always keep a backup of your hard drive of pertinent files, that can reloaded by technician when you either get a new computer or replace the hard drive.
I know that doesn’t help with your situation, but it might prevent a situation in the future. :)
Take it to a trusted professional computer repair tech.
He may be able to read the drive and copy the MP3's.
How to Fix Hard Drive Crash in Windows 10?
In the following sections, we shall take a look at the methods that can help prevent a hard drive crash or can be used if your system is suffering from a regular hard drive crash.
Apart from the guide on fixing Windows 10 upgrade crash, we also offer you solutions to Windows 10 crash after an update, computer crash after installing Windows 10, and computer crashes randomly.
1. Running the SFC Command to Deal with Corrupted Files:
Open Command Prompt
The process has to be carried out from the Administrator Command Prompt window. To open Command Prompt in Windows 10 for repairing a hard disk, you can access it by typing CMD in the searching box beside the Start Menu, right-clicking over Command Prompt, and selecting the option of “Run as administrator”.
Type the check disk command
You then have to type the command into the Command Prompt window, and press Enter. This would help you to run a complete system scan: sfc/scannow.
Run check disk Windows 10
You can then leave the command prompt window open until the command completes its execution. This can take a while depending on the condition of the system. If no error is detected by the command, you’ll see a message which says, “Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations”.
Reboot Windows 10 in safe mode
However, if you see an alternate message which might read, “Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them”, you have to carry out the reboot in safe mode before doing anything else. For the ones who are using Windows 10, accessing the Safe Mode might be tricky as the booting takes place in a very short amount of time, but it can be done by holding the Shift key while clicking the restart option which will allow them to access the advanced boot options menu. For the earlier variants of Windows, one has to hold up the F8 key while the booting takes place. You then have to run the above command in the safe mode.
2. Check for Memory Leak to Ease Hard Drive Crash:
It can be possible that one of your programs is not releasing the memory it has been using after its completion. This can cause the device to run slowly. You can check for the program that is using the most memory by performing the following steps:
hard drive crash
Open the Task Manager with a right-click on the taskbar, and click on “Task Manager”.
Choose the “Processes” tab.
If you are looking to sort programs by their memory usage, choose “Memory (Private Working Set)”.
Event Viewer can come in handy if one is looking to check for program errors and other relevant troubleshooting information.
Open Event Viewer by clicking over the “Start” button, follows it up by clicking “Control Panel”, “System and Security”, and then “Administrative Tools”, and then double click on “Event Viewer”. You could be prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, and you can type it here.
“Applications and Service Logs” lies on the left pane and can be used to check error events. Double-clicking on any of them would reveal the description. You can go online to look for a link.
How to Perform Hard Drive Crash Recovery?
1. Recoverit - the Best Hard Drive Data Recovery Software
As stated earlier, if you are unable to figure out a method to stop the hard drive crash, and have lost some data, you can recover it using the Wondershare Recoverit data recovery software. Besides, sometimes data is still lost, deleted, formatted, or damaged, even if you have repaired the crashed hard disk in Windows 10. Thus, the hard drive recovery software can also come in very handy for you to recover data from crashed hard disk.
Download | Win Download | Mac
2. How to Retrieve Data from Hard Drive That Crashed
When your hard drive crashes in Windows 10, sometimes you cannot reboot your computer. Download Recoverit data recovery on a workable computer. It supports to the creation of bootable media to help you access the computer and get your data back. Follow the next simple steps to retrieve data from crashed hard drive.
recoverit
If you can still boot up your Windows 10 and access the crashed hard disk, this page crashed hard drive data recovery, can be the reference that is more suitable for you to retrieve files back.
If it is an external hard drive that crashes on Windows 10 PC, please turn to the guide for crashed external hard disk recovery.
Step 1 Create Bootable Media for Hard Drive Crash Recovery
Launch Recoverit on a workable computer and connect a blank USB drive or CD/DVD to the computer. Please select “Recover from Crash Computer” to start.
vinyl rules
Sounds like everything except your MP3 files were recovered. Not even one MP3 file? Very strange, if true.
Restore them from your backup. If you don’t make backups, you should start doing so, after following recovery steps.
I’ve had something similar happen, computer just wouldn’t boot up to Windows. So I downloaded a portable Linux kernel that would run on a bootable thumb drive so I could boot the computer without using the hard drive. I was still able to see the files and get them moved off. This is actually not that hard but probably if you’re not comfortable just take it to a tech. I’m just saying that until you hear otherwise, there’s still hope.
SpinRite will even recover sectors marked as bad by Windows. I have been using it since the 80's ... it is truly unique. It boots into its own version of DOS (a FreeDOS variant) so it doesn't matter which OS you are using.
After SpinRite recovers any bad sectors, then use any of the above data recovery programs.
I am betting that you recovered info backed up to your OneDrive (My Documents, etc) verses actually backing up from the old hard drive.
M$ and other have a visceral hatred of anything that does not use its' approved DRM.
For $10 thumb drive you coulda saved yer files.
Take it to the shop where Hunter Xiden took his laptop.
That's what I recommend. About three years ago, my old MacBook Pro died after 12 years. It was the graphic card, but the hard drive was still good, so I had them take it out and put it in a case, and access it when I needed to.
When I traded in my 2005 Altima, and leased my first new car four years ago, I discovered they don't put CD players in cars anymore. I had to take all my CDs and format them into MP3, and put them all on a USB stick so I could play them in the new car. I've got an old iPhone, and didn't want to use it to hold all my music. Hopefully, your hard drive is still good, and you can get your music off of it, then I'd advise you to save them to a USB stick so you'll have them in the future if you need them. I don't use iCloud or anything to back things up. I just put those things on a USB stick.
Remove the old hard drive and plug it into a:
USB 3.0 to SATA IDE Hard Drive Reader
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09D7QK3YD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
Plug the usb cable into your new pc and look for .mp3 using the search icon near the Start button.
In the folder go to View then Details to see the location of where they are.
Copy and paste them say to a folder on the Desktop.
Download the FREE VLC Player to play the music and the video files.
I use Bvckup 2 Pro for Workstation $49.99 Bvckup 2 https://bvckup2.com to copy my files to another hard drive to another internal and a external drive.
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How do I reset the default associations in Windows 10?
Microsoft will reset the file associations and to fix this do the following:
To reset all Apps and File Associations to default in Windows 11/10, do the following. You have to do a Reset first as you will find that just doing a file association that Microsoft will ignore.
Press Win+I to open Windows Settings. Or Start button> Settings icon (gear) then Apps> Default apps
On the right side scroll down and you will see:
Reset to the Microsoft recommended defaults and click on the “Reset” button.
Next go to above list seen there and choose the programs you want.
Example: Web browser> Firefox
Some other file types you will need to go here:
“Choose default apps by file type”> Click on the file type and a popup appears and choose the program app you want.
Example: A .pdf file will open in Microsoft Edge and you want Adobe Reader or the better Foxit PDF Editor
Or for a .zip file you want Winzip or some other zip program.
Do this anytime the issue happens again, generally after installing some other software that has the ability to open images, pdfs etc. A reset then choosing your apps as default again will fix the issue and no restart is needed.
When you do a Windows update it may reset your favorite app to a microsoft one.....
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Start button> Windows System> Control Panel or use the search and type in ‘control panel’
You can create a shortcut for the future by right clicking on the result and Pin to Start or Taskbar.
Control Panel> Default Programs> Set your default programs
PROCON: I see there are lots of helpful comments already, maybe this will bring some more. Good luck!