Customer file backup saved the day.

I received a call from a new customer, saying they were victim to a “Microsoft technical support” scam. I wasn’t able to get a lot of details out of the customer, but here is what may have happened. A likely scenario was either a): the customer got a phishing email, or b): they were on a website that had a banner pop up saying their computer was infected, and to call the number indicated. The customer let the scammer into their computer remotely, who then appears to have reset the computer. The customer, realizing it was fraud, shut the computer off, and called the bank to make sure their accounts were safe, and had them frozen. The bank then referred them to me, and hence where I came in. Fortunately, for this customer, they had a backup of their entire computer on an external 128GB USB thumb drive! Anyway, I took the computer back with me to my bench, and began to troubleshoot. My first step was to see if there was any data that could be recovered. After taking the all-in-one PC apart to get the hard drive out, I began by hooking it up to my bench computer. The customer’s computer is 10+ years old at this point, and the hard drive immediately reflected that with errors, including bad sectors, and my computer not recognizing it because the partitions were corrupted. I used my professional data recovery software, and managed to recreate the drive. However, even though I managed to “recover” files, and save them to the customer USB thumb drive, none of the files seemed to be good, because they were still corrupted and unreadable. Fortunately, because the customer had a backup on their thumb drive already, they didn’t lose any files, or if they did, nothing of consequence. Even though the computer was 10+ years old, it has 2 or so usable years left. I put in an 128GB used solid state drive, did a new Windows 10 installation on it, and returned the computer to the customer, better than new quite frankly. SSD’s even in old computers such as this one, are several times faster than the old, failed mechanical hard drive. Doing this upgrade also saves a computer from the landfill, and saves the customer money, since they can keep using their PC!