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Who’s ready for a really hectic story explaining how I was able to recover around $100,000 of coin from a broken PC despite every data recovery specialist in the US telling me I was screwed.
So I was using electrum and metamask to bounce some coins through some exchanges/protocols. I quickly made two new wallets and when copying my seed keys just took a screenshot of them because I didn’t think I’d be using them for long (never do this.)
I had around 100k worth of coins on the two wallets, and randomly last week my computer ran out of power. It refused to turn on, and got stuck in some sort of boot loop where the same startup logo played and I couldn’t even access system BIOS and diagnose the problem.
The ONLY way to retrieve my keys was to either access those wallets or find the screenshots of the seed keys on my computer itself, so I really started to freak out.
I drove to 3 of the best data recovery specialists in my city and either they had no idea what they were talking about, or didn’t want to touch it out of fear of liability for loss. I went home feeling hopeless and terrified.
The way this laptop works (Surface Pro, never buy one), is that the SSD is actually soldered into the motherboard. It is really risky to move, and a lot of these devices actually have SSD / motherboard failure which is why they don’t make them like this anymore.
I called every top data recovery company in the country. One told me to overnight ship it and that it was 99% that they would be able to retrieve all my files. I hung up, then 10 minutes later they asked me to go on the laptop and get to BIOS. They now said 40% recovery chance
After giving up hope I came up on this random reddit video of a guy turning on and turning off his Surface with the same problem using a broken disk drive that went back and forth for 24 hours. When it turned on everything was fixed. I figured it was worth a shot.
I tweeted asking help to find something that would push a button on/off. I tried a massage gun, which was too fast, then some other stuff, but I eventually went to CVS and got an oscillating fan to push the button. The Surface took 2 full days - almost 48 hours to fully drain.
15 minutes ago, it finally died. I went and plugged it back in, hoping this full battery drain and reset would fix the issue that kept blocking it from booting up again - and it actually worked lol. Coins secured and I’m never touching that laptop again.
Definitely one of the dumber moments of my life. Glad I got out of this one alive - always write down your seed keys friends... you never know
