A Dell Alienware stopped booting after a hard crash left its NVMe SSD's file system inconsistent. The drive itself was healthy; the structures describing it were damaged. We imaged the SSD and repaired those structures to recover the owner's files.
The Alienware had crashed hard during use and would no longer boot into Windows, hanging or showing an error instead. Its NVMe SSD held work files, photos and projects, none backed up. Because the machine wouldn't start, the temptation was to reinstall or run automatic repair — both of which risk the data on a drive that's still readable — so it was brought in to recover the files first.
A crash during a write can leave a file system's structures inconsistent, just as a power cut can: the file's data, its directory entry and the allocation records get out of step, and the volume becomes unmountable even though the underlying flash is fine. On an NVMe SSD that presents normally, this is a purely logical problem — the drive reads perfectly, but the map on it is damaged. The fix is to rebuild that map from the file system's own redundant structures, not to reinstall over the top.
The NVMe SSD was imaged sector by sector and read cleanly, confirming the fault was logical rather than a failing drive. All work then continued on the image, keeping the original untouched — and, since nothing was deleted, TRIM was not a concern here; the data was all present.
Working from the image, the corrupted NTFS structures were analysed rather than blindly repaired. The boot record and master file table were reconciled against their backup copies, the directory tree rebuilt by matching records to the actual data, and the volume reassembled with its original folders and file names. The work files, photos and projects were then extracted intact.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were whole, then returned on fresh media, after which the machine could be reinstalled cleanly. We made the usual point — a fast gaming rig is no more immune to a crash than any other, and a backup, even just an automatic cloud folder, makes an event like this a non-issue.
Sector imaging of the NVMe SSD · manual NTFS repair — boot-record and master-file-table reconstruction from backup structures. Read-only imaging, all work in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually, yes. A crash mid-write tends to corrupt the file system while leaving the data intact, so the files can be recovered even though Windows won't start. Avoid reinstalling or running repair first — both can overwrite recoverable data.
Yes — if the drive presents normally, a logical fault like this is straightforward to image and repair. We remove the drive and recover from it directly.
Be cautious — automatic repair can discard the records needed to rebuild your files. If the data matters and there's no backup, have the drive imaged first.