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Laptop Hard Drive Problem

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by sameetnabar

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Hi,
A few weeks ago, my laptop began giving me the message "Operating System Not Found" upon start-up. I was told by people more knowledgeable than me that the hard drive had died. I bought a USB to IDE adapter to try and retrieve the data from that hard drive onto my work PC. After connecting the old hard drive to the PC with the USB cable, Windows detects the hard drive (the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon shows and I can also hear the hard drive making a whirring noise - don't know if that means it's spinning or not); but the hard drive does not show up in Windows Explorer. Does this mean that the hard drive is junk and no data can be retrieved off it? I have very little knowledge about hardware so I am not sure what else I can do. I have a picture of the error message I get when the laptop tries to boot, if that will help. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
Sameet.

4 replies

by churdoo

Yes the hard drive is bad. As for recovery, best you can do yourself is to put it in the freezer for a half hour or so, yes the freezer -- the cold sometimes helps long enough for you to get data off of it. If that doesn't help (it's a longshot anyway), then your only other options are
a) trash heap or
b) send to a recovery service

Depending on how valuable the data is that's on there, a recovery service like DriveSolutions.com/datarecovery or Ontrack.com may charge $850 or more for recovery.

by pammiepi

...and the drive itself is still good....you mentioned you tried connecting it to your work PC (hopefully it's virus-free). Check to see if the drive shows in Device Manager. If it does, check to see what letter it was assigned...this could be a drive letter conflict. Since you said this is a work PC, I'm guessing there's a few mapped network drives. If the drive you connected is the same letter as a mapped network drive, then you can either disconnect your mapped drive temporarily or assign it a new letter to get the attached drive to show. It sounds like it's spinning up, so there may be hope. :)

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