Hard drive bricked.

So my laptop hard drive has stopped working, my current laptop is a HP Pavilion dv6, with a toshiba hard drive in it. It was running Windows 7, home premium

So what has happened: tried to boot my laptop, it tried to run the startup repair tool, which failed and would often lead to a black screen or the laptop trying to re-start.
Just recently it will no longer register the fact that the laptop even has a hard drive installed.

I'm not fussed about getting the damn thing working, just my files etc off the laptop and onto an external HD, if it is at all possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Greetings, Huntsman227, and welcome to MajorGeeks.

Couple of things you might try for data recovery:

1. Boot to a Linux CD/DVD - if the Linux can see the data on the drive while running from a live environment you may be able to transfer the data to a flash drive.

2. Use a USB adapter (something like this) to transfer the data to a working computer.

Have you tried booting to any optical media such as a Windows 7 disk? If you can boot to a Windows disk you might be able to run some repair or recovery consoles. You might also consider burning and booting to drive diagnostic software, but I would advise holding off on that until you've salvaged your data.

 

Also, please provide the exact HP model number for your machine.

 

Tried all that and no luck. when we tried to use a boot CD, the boot options in the startup menu simply stated hard drive error and to run a diagnostic on it, but the diagnostic just froze and wouldnt let us do anything.
My friend reckons that the hard drive may have been heat warped, which could be why my laptop refuses to acknowledge that there is a hard drive installed.

My last resort is to take it into a repair shop in the hopes that they have some way of recovering my data, but before I do is there any chance that this would work or would I just be wasting money?

 

If, in fact, the platters became heat warped, you'd need to take the drive to a place that is capable of doing forensics. They would need to disassemble the drive in a clean room and go through it platter-by-platter. This could cost $500 — $800. You'd have to decide whether or not what you want to recover is worth the price.

Before replacing the drive, clean out any dust, etc., from the laptop and make sure the fan(s) work(s). If the laptop is overheating, you'll end up having the same problem or worse.

 

Good morning.

To clarify: you booted the machine to a Linux disk and got a message about "hard drive error and to run a diagnostic"? You should be able to run a Linux distro as a live environment regardless of whether the hard drive is corrupted or damaged. My stock Linux mantra:

Try the Linux - a lot cheaper than the labs and you might be able to tell something about how the rest of the machine is operating. You don't know if the platters are damaged or not - there could be several other causes of the symptoms. If they are, I agree with mdonah: I've used both DriveSavers and Ontrack - each offers free online estimates.

If you take the drive to a normal computer repair shop I'd be willing to bet their first steps will include connecting the drive to a USB adapter akin to the one linked to in Post #2 - something you could easily do yourself.