Hard drive failure

[emberjelly]

Hi,

My sisters laptop was throwing up hardrive failure errors, windows scanned it, but didn't fix it, upon rebooting, I get to the logon screen, and then the screen goes black, and comes back showing the logon screen off and on. The PC is non responsive.

I can start in safe mode, however, the C and D drives appear to be empty.


I am pretty worried I will lose the data, and creating an image of the hard drive or something is a bit out of my capabilities.

I was wondering if anyone knows a simple solution, or knows of a good laptop repairperson who could repair/replace the hard drive and recover the data. Im located fountaindale NSW postcode 2258

Thanks,
Jerry

[CAPT-Irrelevant]

Do an error checking scan and repair via a USB mount on another PC.

[emberjelly]

Originally Posted by CAPT-Irrelevant

Do an error checking scan and repair via a USB mount on another PC.

Wouldn't this require removeing the HD from the laptop? I would do this if it were my own PC, but having never opened a laptop before, I think doing it on my sisters laptop is no the ideal way to start

[Forgiven]

Originally Posted by emberjelly

Wouldn't this require removeing the HD from the laptop? I would do this if it were my own PC, but having never opened a laptop before, I think doing it on my sisters laptop is no the ideal way to start

Mate, try the Data retriever, they are our OCAU sponsor. See if that can help you out.

http://www.dataretriever.com.au/

[tenfold]

Originally Posted by emberjelly

Wouldn't this require removeing the HD from the laptop? I would do this if it were my own PC, but having never opened a laptop before, I think doing it on my sisters laptop is no the ideal way to start

What sort of laptop is it? They're usually quite easy to remove...

[emberjelly]

Hi,

I did remove it, however it was a PITA. I had to remove the Optical palm rest, battery, keyboard and memory. Its a dell.

I have connected the HD to my PC, and copied the important files accross.

So what is the next step? Is there an open source recovery and repair program thats easy to use?

Thanks,
Jerry

[emberjelly]

Hi,

I decided just to put a new HD in. I have installed windows and all seems well, for the time being.

Thanks for the help everyone.

[glenpinn]

putting in a new hdd was a great decision, but im curious what model laptop it is to have to pull it apart so much to get the hdd out ???

[emberjelly]

Its a dell 15 n5010 or something. I followed the intructions on the dell website.

The reason was because the palm rest needed to be removed to get at the HDD. But the screws that hold the palm rest on were underneath the keyboard, the screw that held the keyboard on were underneath the lower case, then there were the screws that help the HDD in and they said to remove the optical drive and memory, but I am not sure these two were really necessary upon reflection.

http://support.dell.com/support/edoc....htm#wp1109848

Thanks,
Jerry

[mrbean_phillip]

Heya Mate,
A bit late to the party I am, but now that you have a new drive fitted, see if you can mount the old drive in an USB-caddy, and at least copy the data off of it. Just connect it as a normal USB drive to the laptop, and go from there - but, if I were you, I would have a good virus-scanner in place, just incase.

Have a good one, and hope you get the expected result.

[emberjelly]

Originally Posted by mrbean_phillip

Heya Mate,
A bit late to the party I am, but now that you have a new drive fitted, see if you can mount the old drive in an USB-caddy, and at least copy the data off of it. Just connect it as a normal USB drive to the laptop, and go from there - but, if I were you, I would have a good virus-scanner in place, just incase.

Have a good one, and hope you get the expected result.

Hi,

I have a desktop that I just took the side off and connected the old hdd direct. Copied all the important stuff off (Which i always keep in a seperate partition) and then from my pc to the fresh laptop. Everything seems ok now, but we shall see how we go.

The laptop didn't want to start last night. It asked me to make a repair disk. upon burning it, and putting it in, windows started fine and have since had no problems for 3 boots. Hopefully it was just coincidence, or maybe a problem with reinstalling windows and not a hardware problem.

Cheers,
Jerry