internal HDD brainfart

[Douglas Morrison]

Hi folks,
I'm trying to repair my sons laptop (Toshiba Satellite C650D-12C, Win 7), which crashed suddenly one night and has since stopped working. On attempting startup it almost instantly announces a no hdd error. When trying to reinstall windows 7 or use my recovery discs, they proceed as expected until its time to actually look at the hdd and the options are blank, no drives detected.

I have tried the drive on other laptops and no luck.
It can be found on device manager under disk drives, but cannot be found in disk management. (win XP)
It appeared in disk management through windows 7, but it was offline, un-initialised and un formatted, and would not allow me to repair them.

I cannot imagine what has happened, but i guess if the computers can "see" the device but cannot use it as a storage device, then there must be a way to remedy that?

I am going to buy a replacement drive tomorrow for him anyway, But I would really like to get this old one going again and try to recover some lost data (and then use it as a back up storage for the whole family 😉 )

Many thanks in advance for your help.

 

[dextermat]

Hi,

Well that's toshiba for you.

Can you boot in the laptop bios, if not, you can pull out the battery and unplug the power cord. Press power button 10 sec to get any electricity out of the system. Then plug in power cord and see if it boots.

That way you can be sure you are not buying a hard drive for nothing.
For data recovery, if the hard drive is not detected properly, it will be hell.
Their are a few free programs that does the job, but when the partition is not found, it long and hectic. Hopefully you have some data backup.

I recommend reccuva, or

http://www.easeus.com/resource/hard-disk-data-recovery.htm

 

[Douglas Morrison]

Many thanks for the advice. I'll give that program a try in the morning. All the data can afford to be lost if its too difficult to recover, but I am very keen to bring the drive back to life if possible. The data would just be a bonus lol

 

[smorizio]

for the house if you have wifi or router plug in a small one or two tb device connected to the router. then the family can keep on two drives data they need.