Failing hard drive - daughter abuse, recovery question

[cgilley]

The good news is that she admits to setting the laptop down "abruptly". Since there are no recordings of the incident, I'll take her word for it. My professional opinion is that she damaged her internal hitachi system drive (buried the heads or what have you). Now the system won't boot, and the laptop does not see the hard drive.

It's been a while since I had to deal with this. I moved the SATA drive to my workstation, and my BIOS sees this drive. Booting, I'm now waiting for windows to decide what to do with it. Years ago, someone told me that if the mechanics of a drive were stuck, you might get away with smacking it on the desk once or twice to see if you could free it up. Anyone else recall something like this?

Thanks
cg

 

[coastie65]

The good news is that she admits to setting the laptop down "abruptly". Since there are no recordings of the incident, I'll take her word for it. My professional opinion is that she damaged her internal hitachi system drive (buried the heads or what have you). Now the system won't boot, and the laptop does not see the hard drive.

It's been a while since I had to deal with this. I moved the SATA drive to my workstation, and my BIOS sees this drive. Booting, I'm now waiting for windows to decide what to do with it. Years ago, someone told me that if the mechanics of a drive were stuck, you might get away with smacking it on the desk once or twice to see if you could free it up. Anyone else recall something like this?

Thanks
cg

Hi. Hmmm, If it is working and being seen in the workstation, then it would appear that that Hdd is working, especially if you are not getting any "Head Chatter", which is usually the sign of a failing Hdd and time to back it up if it isn't. If I had to guess, I would say something got jarred loose in the computer, but the Hdd is probably fine. "sitting it down abruptly" says to me, DROPPED [chuckle]. It happens. Anyway, You probably won't get much more than you have gotten on the workstation, due to the difference in the hardware profile that was established when the OS was installed in the Laptop ( has the laptop Motherboard Profile.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I don't recommend banging the drive. It reminds me of people who used to bang their television sets to get the tubes to warm up faster or get rid of snow.

 

[cgilley]

I don't recommend banging the drive. It reminds me of people who used to bang their television sets to get the tubes to warm up faster or get rid of snow.

banging the hard drive - I agree a bad idea in general. But long ago, I saw it revive a 3.5" drive and got the heads moving. Of course, the tech internals are completely different now. When there isn't anything to lose...

 

[cgilley]

I hear no chatter, and I can feel the drive turning, but it is definitely not a happy camper. I pulled up Windows 7 disk management, and it showed the device, but unformatted. I left it working on it, came back to a BSOD. I'll look into that later.

Still digging.... I think it's toast.