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Hard Drive Failure
craig_007 - 26/1/13 at 08:06 PM

My laptop has died on me (dell inspiron 1545) I can't get it to boot past a black screen.

Since then I have bought external reader and removed the hard drive from the laptop and fitted to that.

Now my other laptop read/recognizes the hard drive but when I open it up I can't find any of my files from my previous laptop !!

Doe's this sound like hard drive failure or am I missing something for finding my old files.

Any help appreciated.

gremlin1234 - 26/1/13 at 08:25 PM

1) yes its failed,
2) dont write anything to it
3) if you have good backups use them
4) if you dont have good backups -.*, you may be able to recover files, but need specialist software for it.

ps might just be the boot record/ partition table, and booting windows from a cd and using fixmbr ( pre win7 )

PSpirine - 26/1/13 at 09:30 PM

It's about £500 to have data recovered off a failed harddrive. Stop using it immediately if you want any chance of the data being recoverable.

I've got two HDs which failed which had a lot of my photos on them. Can't justify £500 at the moment, but maybe one day! Pretty sure one failure was a controller rather than the disk itself so all data should still be intact.

pmc_3 - 26/1/13 at 10:01 PM

By cant find any files do you mean you can't find your documents/pictures or you can't read anything on the drive?

jps - 26/1/13 at 11:08 PM

There is free ware software out there which you can use to retrieve data from hard drives that appear to have become empty. One is called get data back i think... A quick google should t turn up some options. No need to go anywhere near someone charging £500¡

Minicooper - 26/1/13 at 11:54 PM

I have used GetDataBack to recover a hard disk, it worked perfectly for me, it's not free though, that is under normal circumstances anyway

Cheers
David

[Edited on 26/1/13 by Minicooper]

designer - 27/1/13 at 11:03 AM

quote:

It's about £500 to have data recovered off a failed harddrive.


At least Dick Turpin wore a mask when he robbed people!

johnemms - 27/1/13 at 12:55 PM

Look at the circuit board on the HDD
Note the board id numbers..
Do search on Ebay..
Replace controler board..
Take off files ..
Sell HDD.. on Ebay..

tegwin - 27/1/13 at 02:28 PM

£500?! Granted it was 5 years ago but the last time I had a catastrophic HDD failiure (head crashing) it cost me about £50 to send the disk away and have the contents sent back on dvds... google it

craig_007 - 27/1/13 at 03:23 PM

Thanks for the help chaps.

So is it likely to be the control board that is faulty ?

I've had a look for control boards but the one a require need to come from America.

PSpirine - 27/1/13 at 03:31 PM

Usually it's the controller that goes, which means all of your data is intact. However, if it stopped working due to a drop/shock or made funny mechanical noises, then it's probably a mechanical failure which is a bit worse!

craig_007 - 27/1/13 at 03:39 PM

No drop or shock etc, when hard drive is connected to external reader the hard drive sounds at it should.

Can I just purchase another 160GB hard drive complete (suitable for my Dell) and use the control board from that ?

Can't seem to track a control board separately.