Is my HDD dead?

KrispieKremePie · May 3, 2019

Hey all,

(I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this)

Last week, my girlfriend's HP laptop wouldn't boot up and it displayed an error message that said "Boot Device Not Found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk." I took out the hard drive and put in an external housing to test it on my computer. When I would plug it in, it would show up in the file explorer for around 30 seconds, but then it would disappear and I am unable to access any of the files on it. There's not a distinct noise coming from it either, other than the basic low hum of a mechanical drive. So that leaves me to my question in the title... is the hard drive dead? And is there any cheap way to get the data off of it?

Thanks for any and all help! :)

Optane^ · May 3, 2019

Yep, probably dead. An easy and cheap way? Not really. If you have a local PC repair shop they might be able to do a data recovery but more than likely sounds like the arm is not working properly.