Help with failing harddrive

[Kyteland]

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. I have nothing I can hook the drive up to except the laptop at the moment.

 

[Kyteland]

**update** I've managed to get it hooked up to another WinXP machine as an external USB drive. I can see everything on the drive, except for the folder she needs.

The files she needs are in the "Documents and Settings" folder for her username (on the desktop) but that folder is set as a private folder and I can't access it. Does anyone know of a way around this folder setting?

 

[JohnG86]

Try the Backup program under System tools, It should bypass the private folder lock and let you backup the files then you can restore them to your computers hard drive.

 

[Kyteland]

That worked. Thanks.