Hard drive problem on old laptop.

[evilpanda]

Hi,

One of my friends dropped his laptop and now every time he tries to turn on windows XP he gets the BSOD. I ran The HIREN boot CD and did a couple of tests which clearly stated that the HDD has many bad sectors in the first couple of minutes. As soon as i noticed that I stopped the process and decided to ask the people in the forums. My question is what can I do to recover the DATA. There are some really important files on there that I really need. The HDD has a total capacity of 90GB. I stopped scanning at 3.01% when I noticed that there were already like 13 bad sectors. What can I do. The files are all that is important. Any help is appreciated.

 

[d33pblue]

Pull the laptop's hard drive and use a USB to 2.5" hdd reader and see how much of the data you can pull off the drive onto a good computer. I would not try to recover the data off the hard drive while it's still in the busted laptop.

 

[Charlie98]

Pull the laptop's hard drive and use a USB to 2.5" hdd reader and see how much of the data you can pull off the drive onto a good computer. I would not try to recover the data off the hard drive while it's still in the busted laptop.

Or install it in a desktop, or use a HDD cradle (I have one for stuff just like this.)

If it immediately starts throwing up bad sectors again, stop and seek professional help!

 

[tweakboy]

Bakcup to external, before she dies.

 

[phis6]

If the drive contains some valuable data then you should definitely stop tinkering the drive to avoid further damage and take necessary measures to clone/image the drive. I suggest you clone it with ddrescue in Linux and then recover the files you need from the clone/image drive you got.