SSD failed, separate data drive & all install media available, need some data and profiles

[Johnny5Step]

This question is not as complicated as it looks. However, I have to include a fair amount of explanation to make it make sense.

I'm not sure I can explain this right, but about a month ago my 4.3 year old SSD failed utterly. This was a week or 10 days after I had upgraded to Windows 10 Home 64bit. I later found out that this is about a normal lifespan for SSDs of that generation. I had almost all my data on a completely separate drive, and good backups, and install media for all the programs that I use, so it wasn't the crisis that it could have been.

I lost a few documents in the My Documents folder that I hadn't transferred to the G drive, and more importantly I lost the profile folders on several of my browsers and email clients. I just recently learned that you can move My Documents to the data drive, but I had tried to move all those profiles to the data drive, but evidently some of them moved back to the active drive.

I just remembered that I had done a WindowsImageBackup in the middle of Sep and put it on an external hard drive. And I think that probably everything I want will be on there. If I had any idea of how to find it.

The thing is I don't know if you can go fishing in the backup for files, or if you have to install the whole thing? Since I don't want any of the executables, but only the data parts, it seems like it should be easy.

Also I have a new unused HDD that I am going to be using for something else and I could let everything restore to it into that if it will give me that choice. Then I could get the stuff I want, and delete the rest, and then use the drive for it's original purpose.

But I've read some horror stories on the internet about people who were trying to do that and ended up overwriting their new active drive unintentionally. Though they were looking for programs, instead of data and I saw some references to "they were given a choice to salvage the data at some point", but they wanted the programs, and in some cases the OS to be back and active, so this wouldn't work for them, but it would be perfect for me, if that is right. If you are offered that choice?

The main image file is 52.6gigs so I think it probably is very complete. It's in a folder 2015SepWindowsImageBackup\Name-of-Computer\Backup 2015-09-13 114720, but I don't know how much of that is a default name and how much I created? The files are mainly .vhdx or .xml and there are 14 of them in the main folder, but only one big one.

If I put the other blank drive in my tower, and try to restore the back up to it, Let's say drive I, will that be possible without messing up my new C: drive?

Anyway if you can give me some guidance as to what is and is not possible that would be great.

I have my new active drive and data drive all up and running fine. Did a clean install of Windows 10 Home 64bit and it's great. I just want those data files and the profiles to go with my browsers and email clients. And I know they are there,or I think they are there. Anyway I've read 50 to a 100 pages on this subject or close, and can't find anybody who seems to know if this is possible or not.

Thanks for any assistance,
Michael

 

[Gideon]

I use Macrium Reflect to image my Samsung 250-EVO. MR is fast and very reliable. My SSD is guaranteed for five years so maybe that is the lifespan of one. This is my first SSD. I used the paid for version of MR but you can get the free version that has almost all of the version of the paid for one. I Image my system on a daily basis which may seem overkill but I do not use system restore.. You should be able to restore that backup without any damage.

Download Macrium Reflect FREE Edition 6.1.887

 

[Trouble]

The files are mainly .vhdx or .xml and there are 14 of them in the main folder, but only one big one.

Hello and welcome to the forum.
While I am not a user of the native Windows System Image Backup utility, mainly because the couple times that I have tried it, it has failed me miserably and the recovery options lack certain features (as you are finding) that other disk imaging software include by default.
I am trying it as I type this as an experiment to see what I end up with.
The reason I am trying it is to test and see if I can use the backup files that it creates, as I would in another (more robust) backup alternative (like Acronis True Image).

If I understand your post, you have multiple .VHDx files ( I have no idea why you would have more than one, I guess I'll see when mine is done).
A .vhd (Virtual Hard Disk) should be mountable by simply right clicking it and choosing "mount" from the context menu, or minimally by using Disk Management to "Attach" a VHD.
If you can mount or attach the .VHDx (the x simply denotes a newer version format of Virtual Hard Disk, as Microsoft has decided to put an "x" after a lot of file extensions .docx .xlsx, etc.,) then you should be able to open the mounted disk in File Explorer and navigate to the files you need and copy them off and or onto where you need them to be.

I intend to try this but with minimal to no compression the process seems to be taking a long time, so I thought I would post this suggestion and see if you wanted to perform your own experiment with your existing .vhdx backup files.

 

[Trouble]

Well, the upside is....
It worked.
I had to use Disk Management to assign a drive letter to the "Attached" .vhdx but I was able to browse the contents and copy and paste files and folders.
So assuming your system image is similar then you should be able to do the same.
By the way I ended up with two (2) .vhdx files
One of my C drive and one of my D drive because of how I have the individual folders in my profile folder configured and pointing to D

 

[Johnny5Step]

Well, the upside is....
It worked.
I had to use Disk Management to assign a drive letter to the "Attached" .vhdx but I was able to browse the contents and copy and paste files and folders.
So assuming your system image is similar then you should be able to do the same.
By the way I ended up with two (2) .vhdx files
One of my C drive and one of my D drive because of how I have the individual folders in my profile folder configured and pointing to D

I was able to get there as well. On the verge of giving up, I finally got an answer from somebody who knew what they were talking about on a different forum (Microsoft Community Answers)

He gave me explicit and clear instructions as how to retrieve single files and/or folders from my image backup, after being told ~50 times on numerous forums that it was impossible (Which if true of course would make that type of backup pointless) Everybody was telling me it was an 'all or nothing' deal, i.e.: that you had to restore the whole drive, which of course would overwrite your new active drive.

As I said, I was on the verge of giving up. Which would mean, removing my new active drive and data drive so they couldn't be hurt. Install a new larger blank drive, put my Windows 7 on it from a disc, then restore the whole active drive from the image. All so I could retrieve my browser and email client profiles, and a very few documents that I hadn't transferred to the Data Drive from the MyDocuments folder before the surprise catastrophic failure of my SSD active drive.

With just a few keystrokes 'Mike P' got me into my backup and I was able to save my Firefox, Chrome, and Thunderbird Profiles; My Documents (there wasn't much in it, but a few files that I hadn't transferred to the Data Drive)

After ~50 people and posts gave me the line "You can't get just a few files out of the image, you have to restore the whole active drive, then you can get them"; it turns out that you CAN get just a few files from a whole image backup, and it's not even really hard.

I was really glad that I had made that image backup about 10 days before my SSD cratered.

The process was not without a few minor unexpected anomalies. Like when I got down to the User folder, at first it said it was empty. And I don't know if it prompted me, or if I guessed, or what, but I had to set up folder sharing on the User folder, and then, after a scary delay, the folders started appearing.

I was able to go down to my main user, to AppData, and to the different folders I needed, and copy and save them.

And for some reason, the Bookmarks.html file was missing out of my Firefox profiles, but there were recent backups in the cleverly labelled 'bookmarkbackups' folder.

Who knows,

Anyway it all worked out without the major machinations that I was afraid would be necessary.

Major props and thanks to Mike P. I thought at the time he might be the only person in the world that was aware of this procedure, but you seem to have used something very like it, which makes me wonder why nobody, out of so many suggested I try that. But eventually I did get there, with some expert help. And now we have it posted for everybody to see.

 

[Trouble]

Excellent!
Glad to hear that you managed to resolve your problems.
As I described in my posts above, it was not a particularly difficult process, just something I had never done before so I had to start from scratch.
I always use Acronis True Image to create disk images of my physical hard drives, which provides me with all the utilities I need to mount an image, browse it and recover an individual file or the entire disk and the image generally consumes only half the physical space as a System Image produced by the native Windows utility.