Hard Drive Dead... I think

My hard drive is dead. When the Laptop boots, it stays at a blue screen and the mouse cursor in the middle and thats it. I booted into the BIOS and tried running a HD Diagnostics and it came back as Failed. Is there a way that I can recover my files from there? I tried putting the HD in an external enclosure but my pc wont read it. It shows up in my computer but when I click it it just hangs and wont open it. I really need some of the files on there. Is there anyway to recover the files from there??? Its an HP Pavilion dv7 1130us model. Thanks in advanced for any help with this.

 

Recovery of files won't be possible unless you can get Windows to actually recognise the drive properly. File Recovery software assumes that the drive is okay and you want to retrieve some deleted files from it, which does not apply in your case.

A drive pronounced as "Failed" is usually beyond all hope of saving anything from it.

 

Hi,

Sometimes Windows Explorer is picky on reading failing drives. Because you got a blue screen and cursor when trying to boot from the drive, I think it is still functional but may have some corruption of the files.

I think I would try recovering files using a Live Linux CD. You would not be installing Linux but just booting from the CD/DVD and running the operating system from there. You should be able to read the HD and copy the files or most of them.

You could either put it back in the laptop and boot the Linux CD from there and copy files to a flash drive or boot the working computer from the Linux CD and use your USB enclosure for the failing drive and copy the files to the working computers HD.

Puppy Linux is sufficient for what you need to do. Lucid version should work (lupu-528.iso).

You need to download the ISO file and then burn it to a blank CD/DVD. Imgburn will work using the "Burn Image File to Disc" option. Burning guide: http://www.calibancomputer.com/computer-tutorials.htm#burning

When you boot up using Puppy you will get to a desktop with icons in the lower left with names like sda1 sdb2 etc. These are equivalent to C: D: drive letters in My Computer.

sd is standard a, b, c, describe physical devices like HD, CD, USB and numbers are partitions. The HD of the computer you are booting from will always be denoted as sda with a different number for each drive or partition. If that HD only has one C: partition you will only see sda1. If it had a D: partition that would be sda2 etc. Your USB external will have a different letter so it may be sdb and since it only has one partition you should see only a sdb1 icon.

You can click on the various sd(x#) icons to see which drives they correlate to. When you find the Windows installation you are trying to recover files from leave that window open. And then click through the other icons to find the drive you want to save files to and leave that one open. Then drag and drop the files between windows. You will be prompted to copy or move--you want to choose copy. Don't choose Move (which would delete the files from the original HD) since you don't want to make any changes to the failing HD in case you need to use a different recovery program.

Those are the basic steps. It should work for most files. It sounds complicated but I really can't think of an easier way. Post back with any questions.

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Putting Puppy Linux on an empty USB flash drive is also possible if your computer will boot from USB. If you don't have any blank disc that is an option.

 

Thanks so much for the info. I will definitely try it out today and will get back to you on this. Thanks again for the info.