Harddrive problems help!

[Bird222]

I'm pretty sure my harddrive is dead. It is a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 SATA 500 GB drive that was in my HP HDX16 laptop. The laptop complains of having 'no boot device'. I hooked the drive up to a desktop I have and the bios doesn't detect it. I also it up to the desktop through a USB adapter I have and Windows calls it "disk 2" and says it needs to be initialized. Questions:

1. Can any of the data be salvaged from this drive?
2. What drive can I safely replace this with in my laptop?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

1. Probably not. If you had backups, it's probably not worth worrying about. If you don't have backups, then the question is whether or not the data on there is valuable enough to spend thousands of dollars having professionally recovered.

2. Any 2.5" SATA drive should work alright.

 

[Bird222]

2. Any 2.5" SATA drive should work alright.

So I don't have to worry about some controller limitation? Could I possibly go to a SSD?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

So I don't have to worry about some controller limitation? Could I possibly go to a SSD?

There is a small possibility your controller is old enough that it will complain if you give it a drive >2TB.

Since you can't buy laptop HDDs bigger than 2TB it won't be an issue.

SSDs should also work fine.