Help - Rescuing a dead laptop drive?

[garycat]

The wife's laptop died yesterday and it appears that it is the hard drive that is dead as there was no response when I put it in the spare caddy on my laptop.

Typically, a backup was never taken so if anyone can suggest a quality USB/SATA adaptor and some free-ish recovery software that could help that would be appreciated as there are some docs and photos on there that we would like to have.

[marshalla]

If this is true and "no response" means it doesn't show up at all

garycat said:

The wife's laptop died yesterday and it appears that it is the hard drive that is dead as there was no response when I put it in the spare caddy on my laptop.

then this

garycat said:

Typically, a backup was never taken so if anyone can suggest a quality USB/SATA adaptor and some free-ish recovery software that could help that would be appreciated as there are some docs and photos on there that we would like to have.

won't do anything. You can try Photorec and/or Recvua but both need the host computer to be able to find the drive before they can attempt anything.

[garycat]

marshalla said:

won't do anything. You can try Photorec and/or Recvua but both need the host computer to be able to find the drive before they can attempt anything.

Yeah :-( the disk didn't appear in the Admin / Storage / Disk Management interface.

[marshalla]

garycat said:

Yeah :-( the disk didn't appear in the Admin / Storage / Disk Management interface.

Probably a failed component on the controller board.

Depending on the age of the drive, a board swap *might* do some good, but newer drives aren't amenable to this as they hold a lot of config. data on the board rather than the platters now. I no longer recommend that anyone tries a board swap at home for this reason.

[gpo746]

marshalla said:

garycat said:

Yeah :-( the disk didn't appear in the Admin / Storage / Disk Management interface.

Probably a failed component on the controller board.

Depending on the age of the drive, a board swap *might* do some good, but newer drives aren't amenable to this as they hold a lot of config. data on the board rather than the platters now. I no longer recommend that anyone tries a board swap at home for this reason.

Good advice
I know someone on e bay who dismantles old boards off drives and sells them. He did well out of it but over the last few months has had to field a lot of complaints that the boards don't work on their (buyers) drives etc
He is covered to some great extent as he sells them as parts but there have still been several disputes opened

[garycat]

Epilogue...

I bought a USB SATA caddy off amazon and amazingly the drive worked in that so I quickly rescued all the stuff that wife thought she had lost.

Should be a BJ at least in it for me after that.

[skelters]

[gpo746]

And get a back up sorted !
You might (dependant on size) just be able to do it with cloud based storage things.