My hard drive crashed on my acer aspire e5-575

Hi! I hate to see hard drives crashing without backups... but at least you were conscious enough to take it out of there and put a new one in.

The best odds at getting whatever you had in there are to leave it chilling until you have Windows up and running again and then connect it through a USB to your computer to attempt data recovery.

I'll try to guide you through the installation of the new system first, you don't need to get anything from Acer aside from drivers for the components and that's even a maybe, Windows is able to find those out on its own nowadays.

So, things you'll need:

• An USB stick, that's where you'll get the Windows installer to and what you'll use to install Windows in your new hard drive. An 8GB USB stick is enough, but you can use a bigger one if that's what you have at hand (note that all of its data will be deleted during the process, you'll be able to use it as a regular USB stick afterwards though).
• A computer running Windows 10 to download Windows and install it in that USB, you may use a friends computer, or maybe one at a library if you don't have another around but you do need to create a bootable USB stick.

The steps to create such a drive would be:

1. Download the official tool to create Windows 10 media: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
2. Insert your USB stick and run the file you downloaded in step 1, you'll see this screen after a while:
   
    
   
   
3. Read and accept that license agreement, then you'll be presented with the option to upgrade that machine or create installation media to use with another machine; choose the latter:
   
   
   
   
4. Select the language you want and edition if there's more to choose from, as for architecture, 64-bit is the right one:
   
   
   
   
5. Next choose the USB stick you had inserted before as the destination of the files and wait patiently while the utility downloads and creates the bootable USB stick:
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. It'll take a while, so while that does its thing let's download something that will prove useful while installing Windows, the drivers for the storage system in your machine. For that, it being Intel based, you need these: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/29289/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-Floppy-Driver-Package?product=55005
   
   
   
   
7. Inside of that ZIP archive you'll find several files, put them all in a folder called "Storage" for example. We'll be copying that folder to the root of the USB stick once the media creation tool has done its thing.
   
   
   

Now off to install Windows, in your laptop, with new hard drive already installed boot from the USB stick you just created. For that you may need to access the laptop BIOS (pressing F2 should take you there when booting) to enable booting from the USB or the boot menu key (F12).

After that's done and the laptop reboots you'll find the USB in the boot menu pressing F12 this time instead of F2, press Enter and it'll start loading the installation program.

Once you get to the point of where you want Windows installed (it's a custom Windows installation by the way, not an upgrade, it'll make you that question at some point; and if it asks you for a key, say that you don't have any). Click on the "Load driver" button and select the Storage folder we created and copied to the USB stick before, you'll then be presented with a list of drivers to choose and there should be either 1, or none. If there's 1, select that one and load it.

Delete all of the partitions in the disk until it's empty by the way, the Windows installer will know what to create



Then click Next and let the installation begin, once the computer reboots the first time you can already take out the USB stick, it's not needed anymore. Oh, and by the way, if your computer has USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports sometimes you're only able to boot from the USB 2.0 ones, it depends on how it's wired inside; in case you're not able to boot from the USB stick, and check that you're running in UEFI mode in the firmware settings as well.

After a couple of reboots more, you should be presented with the Windows OOBE program in which you enter details such as what you want your username to be and whether you want to connect to the Internet or not. If you wish to create a local account and not use a Microsoft one don't connect to the net just yet, say you have no Internet and that you want to continue with a limited setup so you're able to create a local account instead.

And that would be it, you'd have your system running Windows. Now you need to do 2 things, besides customizing everything to your taste: connect to the Internet and wait, say... 15-20 minutes without doing anything. I know it seems like a long time but it gives Windows time to search, download and install drivers for all of the components of your laptop. For example graphic drivers, audio ones, etc.

If there any critical ones you may see a notification that you need to restart the laptop for those drivers to be in effect, it's OK, just wait for a bit and then restart.

The second thing is running Windows Update. For that go to Settings -> Update & Recovery and manually check for updates. It's usually an automatic process, but since it's the first time we better do it manually. Besides, it'll force Windows to download and install any missing driver if it didn't in the time we allotted.

Maybe another reboot and you're done, your system is ready for your to use. You may wish to stop by the support page for your model at Acer support site to download the latest BIOS / Firmware revision and to download and install the Acer Assist program or something like that since it handles some key presses for multimedia keys and the like.

Now for the hard part... recovering the data off of your old hard drive.

As I said before the best thing you could do is take it offline, normally professional recovery services would work off of images of that disk instead of working with the disk directly; not to damage anything further. But that requires you to have another drive of at least the same capacity as that one where to store the image, instead we're going to risk it and connect it directly through any USB to SATA (I presume?) adapter. There are several available and any would do, you don't need to go for the expensive one.

Once connected, if you're able to see its partitions in the File Explorer as if were a normal external hard drive access it and begin copying stuff out of it if possible. The data for your user probably lays inside of Users\YOURUSERNAME\, Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. they ought to be there. If you're presented with a message regarding not having permissions to access some folders simply say that you want to grant those permissions to you, you'll have to wait for a bit, but that's it.

If, you weren't able to see those drives in File Explorer... the partition table could have been destroyed for example, and recovery just became a bit more complicated. Mostly because you'd require a 3rd party program to do the recovery (although it's not free I regard R-Studio as best in its class, the free version allows you to see if it's able to find anything, and it also works with images).

If you reach this point where you need specialized tools to do the recovery, let me know (prefix my name with an @ sign so I get notified although I'll be checking in on this thread) and we can evaluate options and what to do.

Best of luck, let me know of any question you may have and for the love of God, think about backing up to the cloud or a separate hard drive at least the data you hold valuable . I'm willing to bet we all have lost data because of the lack of backups, but nowadays it's easy to set up a backing up solution.