4 Posts
0
1004
October 1st, 2022 21:00
m15 R1, NVMe recovery
last weekend my faithful alienware m15 died. it was running when I went to bed and was dead in the morning. I attempted to resuscitate it by discharging the battery and trying to restart, but no luck. The power cable jack illuminated, but the laptop itself was dead with no lights of any kind. I brought it into the local Best Buy and they confirmed my speculation that it was probably not the battery, but the motherboard and it would be costly to diagnose and repair it. So I resigned myself to recovering the data from the hard drive and moving on to a new laptop. Which brings me to my question...
When I went to remove the harddrive, I discovered that there isn't one! It has two nvme ssds. My hope was that I'd be able to simply mount the hard drive to my desktop pc to recover data, but the dual nvme setup presents a little challenge. I'm not sure whether these were raid configured, in which case I suspect I would need to find a dual port nvme enclosure that supports an intel raid configuration? I haven't been able to find such a thing.
Is there a way I can confirm whether these were set up as a raid array? If they weren't, that would be great! I could just get an nvme enclosure and copy the data off each drive that way.
I -think- there was only one hard drive on my laptop (it was a secondary computer that I only used periodically and I can't be sure.), which suggests to me they were probably set up in a raid array. At any rate... if there's any advice to be had for recovering data off these alienware m15 nvme ssds, I would certainly appreciate it!
crimsom
7 Technologist
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6.1K Posts
0
October 2nd, 2022 07:00
Hi @tdemelle welcome to this free user-to-user Alienware laptop discussion forum.
Please install Alienware m15 NVMe drive within your other PC spare PCIe slot to see if this drive is one half of RAID or a singleton drive.
Tesla1856
8 Wizard
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17K Posts
1
October 1st, 2022 21:00
Interesting problem.
This is one of the reasons I always recommend to not RAID drives in non-servers. And if you do, keep it backed-up.
Hard to provide advice on how to proceed without knowing what the SSDs really are (and how they are configured).
It's a m15 what (what release). What sizes are the SSDs, are they both NVMe, is one an Optane module ... stuff like that.
Maybe you will luck-out and they were just Drive-C and Drive-D ?
tdemelle
4 Posts
0
October 1st, 2022 22:00
Thanks for the reply, tesla. I'm not sure if setting the drives up as raid was an option or whether I'd have known that that wasn't the right way to go if it was! At any rate, I managed to find this info from the original order on the dell service site. Looks like one was boot drive and the other c drive? that's encouraging! Looking at this manifest, it looks like there are part numbers for 3 drives... not sure what HYNIX is...
Tesla1856
8 Wizard
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17K Posts
0
October 1st, 2022 22:00
I see at the top (in bold) is says 1tb + 1tb SSD.
It then shows (2) Samsung 1tb PM981's . What's puzzling is ... the listed Hynix 1tb PC401 is also a SSD.
So, (3) SSDs.
Did you ever figure out what "Release" it is? With that, you could at least download the proper PDF Service-Manual.
tdemelle
4 Posts
1
October 15th, 2022 14:00
following up! I purchased a usb enclosure for the nvme ssd stick and it mounted on my tower and the data was directly accessible. So, although I'm sad the m15 only lasted a couple years (and have no idea why there were 3 ssds on the manifest), happily, I've recovered all my data! Thanks for the help!
crimsom
7 Technologist
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6.1K Posts
0
October 15th, 2022 14:00
Hi @tdemelle thank you for sharing update.
If Alienware m15 (R1) just has a bad M.2 SSD 1TB OS (C:) boot drive it can be recovered by installation of a good OS (C:) boot drive. If under Dell warranty, they can provide a free M.2 SSD 1TB OS (C:) boot drive. If not under Best Buy warranty, purchase different M.2 SSD OS (C:) boot drive or clone (copy) boot drive from your tower using Macrium Software | Reflect Free Edition. Microsoft database will automatically register your OS boot drive when your Alienware m15 (R1) is connected to internet.
Having recovered your Alienware m15 (R1) Data, maybe try $100 Dell Laptop Repair | Dell Repair | Laptop Repair | Notebook Service Center (parts-people.com).
For a few $, I purchased my M.2 SSD standby boot drive from eBay with OS Windows 10 Professional x64 already installed. My original boot drive has not become unrecoverable, but it is prudent to have a standby boot drive to swap in and get system up and running within minutes.
Stellenbosch
1 Rookie
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32 Posts
0
October 20th, 2022 04:00
Any update regarding the data on the NVME, the only problem that you can face is that Windows Bitlocker might be enabled if not it should be easy to copy the data from the NVME ?
tdemelle
4 Posts
0
October 26th, 2022 22:00
I was able to recover all the data off both the NVME SSDs by using an NVME enclosure that plugged into one of my desktop PC's USB ports.