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Recover Data from SP3 that will not power on

brokenneckcp

New Member
I have a Surface Pro 3 that decided to stop working last week. The Microsoft Store and my IT department cannot get the device to power on. Assuming the device is dead forever, how can I get any data stored on the SSD?
 

leeshor

Well-Known Member
Welcome to the forum

The unfortunate answer is that you can't. If it wasn't in the cloud, (OneDrive for instance), and you didn't make a backup anywhere it's probably gone for good.
 

bluegrass

Well-Known Member
It probably won't help in this case but I run into that situation with some frequency on my clients desktops and laptops. I remove the drive & plug it into a USB blackbox attached to a working computer and unless the drive has gone bad, I can recover data off the non bootable drive. If this were a case of not working about the cost, you might be able to tear the Surface apart and remove the SSD and find a way of attaching it as a second drive on another computer. I would only recommend trying this kind of scenario, if your data is extremely important.

I'm not smart enough about the Surface to know whether you could attach an external USB drive that you can boot from and possibly see the boot-dead internal SSD drive.
 

GreyFox7

Super Moderator
Staff member
If it wont power on the only recourse is to open the device, remove the drive and recover the data on another system. Easier said then done.

Folks, backups are critical on these modern sealed units (not just Surface devices). Syncing files to the cloud or a USB drive or local network share is an option to full system images. GoodSync is an option if you want to go local USB or network share.
 

ramiss

Member
Crashplan as well. Great free software for backup to a usb drive and a remote computer running the free software. Paid service is great too.

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk
 
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