hard drive fail - diagnosis & recovery options

A

akkoristitkos

New Member
It looks like after only 3650 hours of serving me, my laptop's internal HDD has given up. (The machine is a HP dv6tqe with Windows 7, the HDD is a SeaGate 750GB 7200RPM drive.) My diagnosis is based on the following:

- The computer won't boot and only gives 'disk error' and 'boot device not found' messages (blue screens of death were increasingly frequent leading up to the event)
- There is no unusual noise from the drive, but...
- It is unreadable to another machine via an external enclosure: it says that the disk is unformatted and has a RAW file system
- I tried a partition recovery tool, but it didn't help (if anything, I probably messed it up even more...)
- SMART diagnostics (with GSmartControl) indicate failed sectors (reallocated sector count=29) and 'uncorrectable error in data'
- SeaTools short drive self test is failed - but curiously, the advanced test did not show any problems

So I have concluded (and am now starting to accept) that the drive is probably dead.

At some point while the laptop was still quasi-functioning, I managed to create a system image. I have heard since then that I should not use this to restore everything as it includes replicas of the failed sectors. So is a clean install the only way to go?

Would it be ok to restore my files (but not the system and programs) from the system image, or is this also a bad idea?

Finally, I've just checked and the HP Parts Store quotes the equivalent of US$450 for the replacement drive. Is this for real?! I expected considerably less than that...

Thanks for any insight.
 
akkoristitkos said:
Finally, I've just checked and the HP Parts Store quotes the equivalent of US$450 for the replacement drive. Is this for real?! I expected considerably less than that...

Thanks for any insight.
Click to expand...

As far as file recovery I won't be of anyhelp as I don't have enough knowledge on the subject (wait for others to reply) but for what I've quoted, you can buy any other laptop HDD (2.5") to replace your dead HDD.
 
Do not image the bad drive to the new one, it will only give you the same troubles. Fresh install windows and then you can transfer your personal data over to the new install.
 
johnb35 said:
Do not image the bad drive to the new one, it will only give you the same troubles. Fresh install windows and then you can transfer your personal data over to the new install.
Click to expand...

So it means if one does't have the Win OPS Key, one is screwed?
 
silv55 said:
So it means if one does't have the Win OPS Key, one is screwed?
Click to expand...

There is a way to retrieve that activation key from the hard drive providing the data hasn't been corrupted. You always need to have activation keys written down somewhere and kept save in case of disaster anyway.
 
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