Laptop HD - help!!!

[grif500]

Hi All!

After some suggestions please....

I use an old Dell laptop at home, which has server me very well, however last week it blue screened for the first time. Didn't think too much of it, so reset it only to get a Disk Read Error on startup (before windows startup, just after the Dell BIOS screen). I've ran the Dell diagnostics, and the drive spins up ok, but it looks like there are several bad blocks that it can't read from, some of which are very early on in the disk.

So far I've tried the following...

1) Attached the drive to another laptop on the USB port. The drive is recognised, but never fully, and eventually times out.

2) Attached the drive to a Linux laptop on USB. I can mount the drive fine, 1st partition containing the Dell software is readable, but the 2nd partition with the actual OS isn't. It mounts it, and knows the size, but never lists any files.

Does anyone have any idea on what I can try next? Any low level disk reading software out there? After any ideas really...

Cheers!

[malman]

Could try the trial stuff from ontrack

Edited by malman on Friday 11th August 17:53

[sp60]

Bit of an off the wall suggestion, but sounds like the disk is on it's last legs.
Been in this situation a few times and been lucky enough to have backups but able to experiment. Couple of drives i had that were unreadable have been temporarily cured by...putting them in the freezer! If you've got no other option, put the drive in a plastic sandwhich bag and freeze it for an hour, then try it again. Dunno why it works but I managed to get two (out of 4) disks readable again for a brief period of time before they died again!

Obviously this should be a last choice attempt, but if all else has failed....

[thepassenger]

sp60 said:

Bit of an off the wall suggestion, but sounds like the disk is on it's last legs.
Been in this situation a few times and been lucky enough to have backups but able to experiment. Couple of drives i had that were unreadable have been temporarily cured by...putting them in the freezer! If you've got no other option, put the drive in a plastic sandwhich bag and freeze it for an hour, then try it again. Dunno why it works but I managed to get two (out of 4) disks readable again for a brief period of time before they died again!

Obviously this should be a last choice attempt, but if all else has failed....

Contraction & Expansion. The HDD is made of metal so if it's a mechanical problem you can often buy enough to time get data off the drive by freezing it, this the metals shrink slightly and increase the distance between head and disk... tapping the side with a screwdriver and free up jammed heads as well... but is again last attempt of the desperate.

It sounds like the OP has been very unlucky with the apperance of bad sectors and that one of them has appeared around the FAT table and/or track 0. OnTrack's software might be good enough to get the drive properly readable however it sounds like you might need to engage the services of OnTrack themselves; that leads to the question "Just how much is that data worth?"

[grif500]

Thanks for the advice so far

Got to admit, sticking my harddrive in the freezer wasn't my first thought.. but I'm definately willing to give it ago. The data on there isn't that important, more of sentimental value (family photo's, etc..) so don't think I'll be sending it off anywhere. I'd agree along hte lines of the bad blocks been in the FAT table (presume this is the same as the superblock on a linux disk?). I've got to admit to being a novice when it comes to windows, on Solaris you can recover the superblock, is there a utility to do something similar on Windows? Or is that what the ontrack package does?

Thanks again, will report back once I've defrosted my hard drive!