It sounds bad. Removing a drive without clicking "safely remove hardware," especially when the drive is being written to, can cause problems. Who knows about the encryption and what damage that might have caused.

There is plenty of data recovery software on the market but frankly I haven't needed any in a long time so I don't have any current recommendations. The last one I used was from Ontrack but that was quite a few years ago, although it worked just fine.

Professional data recovery is also an option but that can be expensive. Hopefully you have backups of the missing data...

Solution: DH was told by his work IT guy that he couldn't do anything to help, but, suggested he go back to the office computer of our accountant where the trouble began. So he did. The accountant had his IT guy remotely do a decryption of the drive and it worked - all files are there and can easily open. I suppose it had to be done on the same computer that started the trouble of encryption.

And now that you have had a miraculous recovery, the next thing to do is copy all the data on that drive to a second location so you have a backup.

Yep, agreed! Whenever DATA is that important you need to make backup/copy (keeping them current and the destroying the old backup/copy). I use to manage the computers at my last job and had trouble getting the employees to make monthly Cloned Copies of their drives. I usually had to go do it myself. I've had to rebuild numerous computers that weren't backed up, it takes hours and hours (Installing Operating Systems, Downloading & Installing Service Packs and Updates, Installing Office Packages and Updates, Installing frequently used programs for the business, etc...). With a Cloned Copy I only needed to replace the Corrupt Hard Drives with the Cloned Copy. If it was Cloned once a month or more, they would only loose that amount worth of DATA and I wouldn't have to rebuild the Hard Drive!

kudzu9, done. I told my DH to make a backup several weeks ago. He learned his lesson.

Glad it worked out. Just for readers to remember it could have just as easily been what Mikie said. When a drive is removed from a system without using the Safe Removal utility the user risks total loss of data, the data becoming a read-only file, or the loss of use of the area on the drive which was with data upon ejection.

DA

debo-
Good for you. At least you didn't end up like a professor acquaintance of mine who had 7 years of research data on his laptop which he lost when the hard drive died and he had no backup!