Hard Disk Failure

[SNeaKyTiKi]

Alright, a friend of mine has a dell notebook that has suffered a hard drive failure and he needs some data off of the drive. i was wondering if there was anyway i could hook up his notebook drive to my pc or to my laptop to recover his data. Ive never dealt with a failed notebook drive before and i was wondering if anybody had any suggestions on how to recover the lost data.

Thanks for the help

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

lol thx, those are hilariuos. He fried his and broke his screen when he took his laptop apart to clean it out cus it kept on rebooting. The Dell certified enginneer said the notebook was overheating because the heatsink fan was stuck to the cpu which is a 2.4GHz.

But the BIOS can identify the hard drive and i think im gonna try to do a fresh install of xp and then recover the data. If i remember right the data should still be on the disk until it is overwritten, even after a format, then i'll just recover it that way. I think he just spiked it with some good ol' static electricity.

<i>
7. Construction Calamity
During the construction of a large office building, a steel beam fell on a laptop computer containing the building plans, crushing the laptop.
</i>

lol i love that one, thats God's way of saying......nooooooo.

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

.....and by <i>hilariuos</i> i mean hilarious...

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[Ned_Flanders]

If you reinstall windows you might / probably will lose some data, even after data recovery.

(\__/)
(='.'=) <A HREF="http://snipurl.com/fxwr" target="_new">Welcome to the House of Horrors, welcome to the House of a 1000 Corpses</A>
(")_(")

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

how much do those guys cost?

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[_WW_]

In your first post you call it a hard drive failure.
Then:

But the BIOS can identify the hard drive and i think im gonna try to do a fresh install of xp and then recover the data.

If it works well enough to reinstall XP then maybe it is not the HDD...maybe we are just talking about an operating system failure in which case I would try to hook it up to another machine and recover the data.

....WW (5.1)

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

what kind of connector would i need, i know wusy said it could by a nasty hastle...

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

he still has a few gigs of free space so could i partition the drive in DOS somehow using a bootdisk and then install xp on the partition and attempt to recover the files he wants that way....im guessing the files he wants are anywhere from 5-10 gigs. the hard disk is a 40 gig.

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[_WW_]

That could work provided there is enough space. You may want to use something like Partition Magic or Partition Expert.

The adapter might be <A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812116211" target="_new">this one</A>.


....WW (5.1)

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

lol i guess the drive was toast, i couldnt even repair xp in the command console. I kept on getting errors saying this disk was damaged. Even after a full formati got disk errors...luckily our buddies at dell customer support sent a replacement drive for free...thx for the help.

What i dont get is how the harddrive got destroyed, he did say he was getting random restarts etc, so maybe it was slowly dying. So when he took it apart it went to hardware heaven.

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

yeah thats what he was trying to do....he broke the screen and the hard disk. lucky for us we got dell!

whatever happened to the 'dude ur getting a dell' guy?

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[offgreen]

busted for pot...

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

that blows

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>

 

[peterjedi]

Sounds like coke

 

[SNeaKyTiKi]

...exactly...

<i>I'm a Sneakytiki!!!</i>