*fixed* Help fix my sisters computer!!

[Kyteland]

I posted this in General Hardware and got no response.

My sister has a 2 year old Compaq laptop and about a month ago the BIOS started giving an error "imminent hard drive failure" or something along those lines. She thought that it was a virus and brought it to me to look at this weekend.

When I got ahold of it, the computer would still boot, but was prone to just shutting down suddenly. I ran a surface test of the disk and it found all kinds of bad sectors, which it replaced, but as of yesterday morning the drive won't boot. It will go through the "starting Windows XP" screen and occasionally get to the login screen, but then it will turn off suddenly.

I went out and bought a USB enclosure so that I can hook the drive to my computer and get some data off of it, but it makes this ominous clicking sound when powered up. The "Unplug or eject hardware" wizard detects the the USB connection and says it is working properly, but the drive never appears in my computer.

Is there anything else I can do? I'll attempt the freezer trick if nothing else works.

Update: The laptop bios detects the hard drive still. Is there any kind of bootable CD I can use that can read NTFS and will allow me to access a network? That way I can pull off the files I need on to my computer. I have nothing I can hook the drive up to except the laptop at the moment. The USB enclosure didn't work.

Edit: I posted this here because she's going to kill me if I don't fix this fast. I don't know why since I didn't break it to start with.....

 

[Ness]

In short, probably not.


I think instead of a USB enclosure, you should try an adapter to hook a laptop HD up to an standard ATA connector, startup your computer, and if the laptop can still read it from that connection, so should your computer.

 

[silverpig]

You could try a knoppix or gentoo liveCD...

I've not tried a knoppix cd yet, but I know you can do what you want with gentoo. Just mount the drive, enable ssh and log in remotely. Then copy what you need and yeah... I hear knoppix is even easier though.

 

[Kyteland]

I've hooked it up to my parents computer using the USB enclosure. Apparantly it didn't like my 2000 machine because it works fine on their xp machine. I'm trying to get all of the files now.

 

[huesmann]

Bart PE NTFS Boot CD.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Boot from a Knoppix CD and you may be able to recover some of the data. It will automatically mount the drive and you can copy the files to another network storage space, or usb drive.

 

[Kyteland]

I suppose I should mention that I had 2 threads going and this was figured out in the other one.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1322356

Thanks for the suggestions.