Hello all, first time poster here. Before I begin let me say that I am NOT very literate when it comes to computer hardware.
A little more than two years ago (April 2014) I bought an Asus N56DP for personal and college use. Mostly without problems, except for slowdowns which I attributed to having far too many Chrome tabs open. A few months back, however, I started getting system messages saying that my hard drive was at risk of failing, and that I should back up my data. Concerned, I ran check disk, and it only found 1 bad sector, which I then set to be repaired. I also downloaded another disk-checking program (I don't remember which, unfortunately) and it also returned basically no issues. I decided to ignore it, which admittedly was not a wise thing to do.
Around two weeks back, the message began to pop up again, so I checked the disk again, and ignored it again. This was while I was attempting to run a game through Steam (the first time I'd done so - I thought it would be a not-very-hardware-intensive task considering it was a port of a PS1 game). Because the game had various issues, from freezing to lack of sound, I was restarting my laptop quite often, sometimes even having to hard shut off by holding down power button, although I was able to log on and get to my desktop screen just fine.
After one such hard shut off, it froze at the screen right before the log on, where it displays the date and time against a background. I hard shut off, then turned it back on. However, this time, it stayed (not froze) on the first screen you see when booting it up, a black screen with the Asus logo and a loading wheel beneath it. It stayed like that for a good while, wheel spinning, so I lay down on my bed to let it do its thing. When I looked up after about a half hour, it was still "loading". A while later, and it was just on a black screen. No sort of inputs would yield any results. I hard shut off various times after this, and every time it stayed on the Asus screen, though eventually it got a "please wait" message beneath the wheel, which it had never had before.
Holding (I believe it was) shift+F8 on boot up simply changed the Asus logo to a purple windows logo, but still nothing. When I pressed (I think) F2, I got to a boot manager screen of sorts, but there was no option to boot from disk. F9 did nothing. I eventually took out the battery, unplugged the charger, and left it overnight. In the morning I held down the power button for longer than 10 seconds, put in the battery, and still nothing.
I am unsure of which buttons did what because about a week ago I decided to take my laptop to a local repair shop. They took the hard drive out and put it into a hard drive reader, and it was not detected/found, either by various data-recovery programs they tried nor in the control panel. It's also worth noting that I am unsure of I could heard the disk spinning/making sounds, because of the fan. Eventually I just settled for having a new hard drive installed with Windows 8.1 (which is what I was on). The laptop is still at the shop since they are fixing a loose hinge. I have the hard drive with me.
More things of note: I used to have three virtual disks mounted, which I forgot about, but I dismounted them on the day I was fiddling with my laptop to get the game running.
So to sum it up: laptop suddenly would not get past asus loading screen, hard drive problem messages despite disk check saying it was okay, hard drive is not found when connected to a different computer by way of an external device. Is the hard drive unsalvageable? Is the PCB maybe burnt?
A little more than two years ago (April 2014) I bought an Asus N56DP for personal and college use. Mostly without problems, except for slowdowns which I attributed to having far too many Chrome tabs open. A few months back, however, I started getting system messages saying that my hard drive was at risk of failing, and that I should back up my data. Concerned, I ran check disk, and it only found 1 bad sector, which I then set to be repaired. I also downloaded another disk-checking program (I don't remember which, unfortunately) and it also returned basically no issues. I decided to ignore it, which admittedly was not a wise thing to do.
Around two weeks back, the message began to pop up again, so I checked the disk again, and ignored it again. This was while I was attempting to run a game through Steam (the first time I'd done so - I thought it would be a not-very-hardware-intensive task considering it was a port of a PS1 game). Because the game had various issues, from freezing to lack of sound, I was restarting my laptop quite often, sometimes even having to hard shut off by holding down power button, although I was able to log on and get to my desktop screen just fine.
After one such hard shut off, it froze at the screen right before the log on, where it displays the date and time against a background. I hard shut off, then turned it back on. However, this time, it stayed (not froze) on the first screen you see when booting it up, a black screen with the Asus logo and a loading wheel beneath it. It stayed like that for a good while, wheel spinning, so I lay down on my bed to let it do its thing. When I looked up after about a half hour, it was still "loading". A while later, and it was just on a black screen. No sort of inputs would yield any results. I hard shut off various times after this, and every time it stayed on the Asus screen, though eventually it got a "please wait" message beneath the wheel, which it had never had before.
Holding (I believe it was) shift+F8 on boot up simply changed the Asus logo to a purple windows logo, but still nothing. When I pressed (I think) F2, I got to a boot manager screen of sorts, but there was no option to boot from disk. F9 did nothing. I eventually took out the battery, unplugged the charger, and left it overnight. In the morning I held down the power button for longer than 10 seconds, put in the battery, and still nothing.
I am unsure of which buttons did what because about a week ago I decided to take my laptop to a local repair shop. They took the hard drive out and put it into a hard drive reader, and it was not detected/found, either by various data-recovery programs they tried nor in the control panel. It's also worth noting that I am unsure of I could heard the disk spinning/making sounds, because of the fan. Eventually I just settled for having a new hard drive installed with Windows 8.1 (which is what I was on). The laptop is still at the shop since they are fixing a loose hinge. I have the hard drive with me.
More things of note: I used to have three virtual disks mounted, which I forgot about, but I dismounted them on the day I was fiddling with my laptop to get the game running.
So to sum it up: laptop suddenly would not get past asus loading screen, hard drive problem messages despite disk check saying it was okay, hard drive is not found when connected to a different computer by way of an external device. Is the hard drive unsalvageable? Is the PCB maybe burnt?
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