So I've been trying to fix the hard drive from an Alienware M14 laptop for the past few days now. While I've pretty much concluded that the drive is completely and utterly borked, I thought I might as well ask here and see if anyone might have a suggestion for something that I haven't tried yet.
The problem is that the operating system is corrupt. The machine refuses to boot into Windows or into a recovery environment. The owner of the laptop contacted Dell and got ahold of a recovery USB. The computer can boot into the recovery environment off of the USB, but the repair process will fail, stating that the hard drive is locked and cannot be accessed.
So I removed the hard drive and plugged it into a desktop PC running the same operating system as is installed on the laptop hard drive via an external enclosure, in hopes of running chkdsk. The disk would not appear in Windows Explorer when plugged into the PC via an external enclosure (although it would show up in device manager and the disk management tool). I could get it to show up in Windows Explorer by connecting the drive directly into the motherboard and rebooting without updating the boot settings in the BIOS. However, the disk cannot be written to, read, or even formatted. chkdsk can be set to run from command prompt, but when you reboot and check disk runs, it will simply sit at 0% for several hours before freezing and becoming entirely unresponsive. If you boot the computer with the drive connected alongside a healthy drive and update update the BIOS settings, the machine will either run chkdsk or boot into a recovery environment. However, none of the options in the recovery console will run; it will immediately produce an error stating that the disk is locked and must be unlocked in order for the selected operation to work.
For now I just replaced the bad drive with a working 120 GB 2.5'' SATA drive I had sitting around and imaged it using the USB recovery media that Dell sent the owner. But if I can get the original drive working again, that would be preferable to giving the owner back the laptop with none of his old data and 1/7 the storage space.
The problem is that the operating system is corrupt. The machine refuses to boot into Windows or into a recovery environment. The owner of the laptop contacted Dell and got ahold of a recovery USB. The computer can boot into the recovery environment off of the USB, but the repair process will fail, stating that the hard drive is locked and cannot be accessed.
So I removed the hard drive and plugged it into a desktop PC running the same operating system as is installed on the laptop hard drive via an external enclosure, in hopes of running chkdsk. The disk would not appear in Windows Explorer when plugged into the PC via an external enclosure (although it would show up in device manager and the disk management tool). I could get it to show up in Windows Explorer by connecting the drive directly into the motherboard and rebooting without updating the boot settings in the BIOS. However, the disk cannot be written to, read, or even formatted. chkdsk can be set to run from command prompt, but when you reboot and check disk runs, it will simply sit at 0% for several hours before freezing and becoming entirely unresponsive. If you boot the computer with the drive connected alongside a healthy drive and update update the BIOS settings, the machine will either run chkdsk or boot into a recovery environment. However, none of the options in the recovery console will run; it will immediately produce an error stating that the disk is locked and must be unlocked in order for the selected operation to work.
For now I just replaced the bad drive with a working 120 GB 2.5'' SATA drive I had sitting around and imaged it using the USB recovery media that Dell sent the owner. But if I can get the original drive working again, that would be preferable to giving the owner back the laptop with none of his old data and 1/7 the storage space.