Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery from Broken Hard Drive. Any good recovery programs / suggested repair options?

[Wilard]

Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery from Broken Hard Drive (already formatted but inaccessible when plugged in. probable physical damage). Any good recovery programs / suggested repair options?

Story time: four years ago my parents bought a laptop to use as a home computer to store photos/ videos as well as for homework use for my younger brother. instead, he uses it to play games, which he gets angry with and the other day admitted that he hit the body of the laptop and now it wont start up any more.

HP ENVY - not sure which model in particular.
Starts up and tries to repair immediately, before blue screen for 0.3 seconds and going to a screen saying boot hard drive is not connected, all cables are in place, and connecting the hard drive to another pc requires reformatting so the data would be lost

 

[jay32267]

Connecting the hard drive to another PC does not require reformatting.

I would connect it to another PC as a "slave" and see what happens.

 

[seagate_surfer]

Hello Wilard, dont know how old the computer is but it will probably be a good idea to contact HP Support. Also a suggestion would be not to tinker too much with the HDD. The more you do, the more expensive is to recover the information or even worse, you could damage the drive further and risk loosing the info for good.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

You can try data recovery software but I honestly don't hold out much hope if the drive really is damaged.

It never occurred to you that important files should be backed up on different media - - that this is just common sense?

All hard drives fail sooner or later - - - you have to take steps to be fully prepared for that.