Laptop drive dead, help!

[Englishman]

Hi there, hoping someone can help me here

 

My laptop has recently decided it doesn't want to play nice, and crashed mid use. I cannot remember exactly what happened but there was a message something along the lines of "the operating system has encountered an error and must shut down", so it shut down, and ever since it's not booting back up into windows. It gets into the post tests, flys through those, but hangs just at the stage where the windows boot sequence would normally kick in. 

I can hear the hard drive spinning up and the head trying to read data, but nothing's happening.

 

I've since taken out the hard drive and temporarily put it in my desktop to see if i can salvage anything; no luck. It powers up fine, spins up and the works. But no matter what i do nothing is detecting it, not disk manager, nor any application i throw at it.

 

Just wondering if there's any tips or tricks that one of you can send my way, as it would be much appreciated, the data on there is fairly important to me (yes, i know, should have backed up blah blah...)

 

As for details. The laptop is a dell studio 1749, and the hard drive is a toshiba 7200rpm 320gb job.

 

Cheers for any help!

[Guest]

Sounds like bad head = dead unless you get some professionals in there

[SSOB]

it's dead . I reccomend you look at this awesome drive : http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-Inch-adapter-Internal-CT240M500SSD1/dp/B00BQ8RM1A

[CwGoh]

You may want to try the freezer method for a last-ditch effort to salvage data. Get a new drive. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBg0mrHXOQ

[flibberdipper]

You may want to try the freezer method for a last-ditch effort to salvage data. Get a new drive. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBg0mrHXOQ

NEVER do the freezer method. It can get condensation and ruin it further. I did that once.

[CwGoh]

NEVER do the freezer method. It can get condensation and ruin it further. I did that once.

 

Placing it in a anti-static bag then a zip lock one will prevent it. 

[flibberdipper]

Placing it in a anti-static bag then a zip lock one will prevent it. 

I still don't trust it. Once it destroys your hard drive, I guess you never want to try it again.

[Englishman]

Ah, well damn. So it's just dead then? 

Not a chance of getting any data from it? If not, any reasonably cheap + good data recovery companies that someone can recommend?

[joshuamurphy]

Ah, well damn. So it's just dead then? 

Not a chance of getting any data from it? If not, any reasonably cheap + good data recovery companies that someone can recommend?

The word cheap and data recovery usually aren't used together atleast where I live.

If it was really important wouldn't you have another copy somewhere? and you should always backup your stuff from now on

[IdeaStormer]

Placing it in a anti-static bag then a zip lock one will prevent it. 

 

You will also have to make sure all moisture is out of the bag, maybe if you tossed a big silica bag as well, but really does the freezer method even make any logical sense to anyone? Nope.

[Monty007]

I had a similar situation.  I tried every back up recover program I could find.  File Scavenger is the one that finally worked for me.  I also don't recommend putting it in the freezer.