Acer Aspire 4810T hard drive failed and cannot access bios

[dpgallant]

Hi, I currently have an issue with a friend's laptop.
By the sounds of it the hard drive started to corrupt or fail as he couldn't access his outlook email store. later, windows had issue starting. now, the laptop can't even find a bootable disk on the hard drive. it tries to boot from cd-rom or network pxe. the drive clicks approx once per second.

Oddly as well, I can't access the bios settings (even though it does give the acer logo and say press F2 to enter setup). I don't know if this means there could be a motherboard issue in addtion to the HDD.

I have placed the drive in a usb enclosure and windows does not recognise the hard disk as a mountable drive, so cannot view any data. I've tried a couple of applications which see the volume, but say that it is bad and cannot mount it successfully. (MiniTool Patition Wizard finds no partition and Power Data Recovery just hangs)

I'm guessing that it is a physical failure and will need replacing.

What's the best way forward in trying to recover files from this disk? Is the freezer technique worth a go?
Could there also be a problem with the motherboard.

Thanks in advance.

Dan

 

[popatim]

will the laptop access the bios without the hdd installed? (it should)

I doubt The freezer method will have any affect. you have the click of death and it's likely the drive is shot beyond data recovery. There is a chance that its just a stuck head, if you can open the drive you may be able to see what the cause is and un-stick it long enough to recover data. Either way you will be buying a new drive, once opened outside of a clean room the drive is sure to die. How long you have to recover data is anyones guess so be ready to move fast if you do this.

 

[fzabkar]

How does HD Sentinel detect the drive? Can you its SMART data?

Can you show us the contents of sector 0 with a disc editor, eg DMDE or HxD?