Is my mom's hard drive dead?

[schneiderguy]

My mom was complaining to me yesterday that her laptop "wouldn't turn on", so I had a look at it. It POSTs fine, but then the screen goes blank and windows wont load. I tried loading safe mode, it gives me the dialog to choose to boot in safemode or normally, but windows still wont load after that.

So the second thing I did was burned a Ubuntu liveCD and tried to access the harddrive once linux loaded. Again, didn't work.

The third thing I tried was to boot off of the windows disk and attempt to chkdsk. That didn't work, it said there were one or more unrecoverable errors. The dir command (list directory) didn't work either. I tried fixboot and it said it repaired the corrupted boot sector, but windows still doesn't load.

Unfortunately she didn't have anything backed up so shes going to end up losing a lot of stuff if the drive is dead.

Any ideas? I was thinking about doing the hard drive in the freezer trick to see if that can give it a couple hours of life.

Oh yeah, I can hard the hard drive clicking when its being accessed, but instead of a constant click click click its more of one click every ~second.

Thanks🙂

 

[ShadowFlareX]

I had experience with dead HDDs, and all of them did the clicking sound per second. The dead HDDs were 3.5", used external enclosures to try accessing, but only clicks were heard and device was not detected in Windows.

Usually there's a software If you want to be sure if it's dead or not, get an external enclosure for the 2.5" HDD, take the HDD out of the laptop and try accessing it that way. Also use data recovery software if it did work to save stuff.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yeah, her hard drive is failing. Happens all the time. You could try attaching it as a secondary or USB drive to another PC and attempt to read the data files with Runtime's "GetDataBack" or DIDATA's "DART" programs. Sometime they work, and sometimes it doesn't. It depends on how bad the drive is.

Suggest she get an external USB drive for backups from now on. Or, if you or she has an old PC, look at installing Windows Home Server on it to make automated daily backups.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Try the freezer trick, if that fails try out the software RebateMonger suggested.

You can also try out spinrite, that worked for my Mom's hard drive when it failed.

 

[schneiderguy]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
You could try attaching it as a secondary or USB drive to another PC and attempt to read the data files with Runtime's "GetDataBack" or DIDATA's "DART" programs. Sometime they work, and sometimes it doesn't. It depends on how bad the drive is.

Thanks, I'll try that

 

[Nocturnal]

Download and burn Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test. Boot from CD, run the advanced test and post the results.

 

[imported_BadBlock]

If you suspect the drive is failing do not do anything like chkdsk or full disk drive diagnostics. The data is what is valuable here not the drive, and programs that sit there grinding away could use up what little time you have left. Screw around with those after you have the data.

With regard to the Ubuntu livecd not seeing the data, ubuntu systems will mount ntfs partitions on removable media and on drives in the system that it is installed on but I'm not sure if it will mount ntfs partitions when you are in livecd mode.

Since you can still detect the drive and you can get to the safe mode select screen that is a good sign because it means the drive is at least partly functional. What you should do is pull the drive out of the laptop and plug it into an already working desktop, if it is sata it will plug straight in, if it's an ide laptop drive you will need one of those:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16812203012

Once you have the drive plugged in boot up the desktop computer, assuming it sees the data partition on the laptop drive copy any files you can onto the desktop computer drive, if you get read errors skip that file and try the next. If you can get all the important data that way then you can start playing around with drive diagnostic tools since you no longer care if it dies.

If you try to copy files off and it doesn't work or keeps getting constantly stuck then stick the drive in a linux machine and use the program ddrescue to copy the entire drive byte-for-byte skipping errors, under ubuntu I think this is gddrescue. When doing this you will need free space on the desktop computer equal to the total capacity of the laptop drive, if you can image it successfully with ddrescue then you can get the files back at your leisure and no longer have to worry about the notebook drive failing.