Hard Drive Not Booting / Reading

A

andantesash

Member
I am having a problem with my Toshiba Internal HD, my computer done the latest windows update and it restarted and now its saying there's no bootable device.

I've tried booting in safe mode, removing battery, holding power for 30secs etc. I've also taken the drive out and put in another drive which boots up fine, added the drive with issues into my SATA dock and it's not reading in my computer. Also tried booting up with Ubuntu disk to see if it would read the external drive that way but still nothing.

When the drive is plugged in to the dock and I move it around its got the magnetic movement which suggests its running, I can also here it if I put my ear up to it.

Any suggestions on a way to fix this? Not sure if the partition has become corrupt or something - any advice would be grand!

Thanks
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
Go into the BIOS and confirm that you have the correct drive selected as the boot device.

save, and reboot!
 
A

andantesash

Member
I tried that first, when I plug the hard drive in internally to the laptop but it doesn't find any device. I can only get the laptop running when I plug in another HD internally and boot from that. I currently have the HD that isnt working plugged in via SATA Dock trying to get it running but having no luck.
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
So then likely either the drive is toast or its been corrupted and needs to be formatted.

Have you gone into disk management within windows and see if its showing there? or I guess maybe you can't?
 
A

andantesash

Member
It's not showing on disk management when I have it plugged in via the dock. I tried refitting it the laptop and booting it up using my ubuntu disk but it said no drive found when I tried to access.

Also diskpart list disk is showing my temporary hard drive in laptop and saying - no media on the E: drive that I have the problematic HD
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Toshiba hard drives suck, stay away from them. Get a new drive and copy over any data you can get off of it.
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
Sadly, you might be out of luck. @johnb35 is right.. Hitatchi drives are awful and unreliable and thats why many laptop manufacturers use them..they are cheap.

So, ya..do as he said and look for a new drive.. in fact, take the opportunity to upgrade to a 2.5" solid state drive and not only will you get reliability but the speed and performance will be increased significantly.

A 250GB Samsung 860 EVO at Newegg.com is $80 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147676
 
A

andantesash

Member
The drive I replaced it with is a 1TB Samsung and seems to be running fine. But like I said I was looking for ideas on how to recover data or fix the drive.
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
andantesash said:
The drive I replaced it with is a 1TB Samsung and seems to be running fine. But like I said I was looking for ideas on how to recover data or fix the drive.
Click to expand...

You won't be able to fix the drive, if its ****ed up..its ****ed up.

Only hope is to recover data as @johnb35 mentioned above... if you still can't recover the data, it may be a total loss. (This is why we backup stuff to external drives and/or utilize cloud services of one variety or another)
 
Agent Smith

Agent Smith

Well-Known Member
Use a SATA to USB drive adpater and try running unstoppable copier. Parted Magic has some tricks to and if it's a platter HDD Regenerator has helped me, but I had to re scan the HDD about five times with HDD Regenerator. With it I was able to copy most of my data, but not all.
 
JaredDM

JaredDM

Active Member
andantesash said:
It's not showing on disk management when I have it plugged in via the dock.
Click to expand...

It's most likely a hardware issue. If the drive's not clicking it can almost certainly be recovered by a data recovery company with the right equipment. But, probably not DIY.

johnb35 said:
Toshiba hard drives suck, stay away from them.
Click to expand...

Actually, among the 2.5" size drives Toshibas are probably the most reliable drives out there.

Laquer Head said:
Hitatchi drives are awful and unreliable and thats why many laptop manufacturers use them..they are cheap.
Click to expand...

Hitachi drives are also very good. Maybe you don't know this, but WD actually sells rebranded HGST (formerly known as hitachi) as their enterprise Gold drives because even they recognize that they are more reliable. Perhaps you're thinking of Seagate who makes the cheap drives that constantly fail?
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
JaredDM said:
Hitachi drives are also very good. Maybe you don't know this, but WD actually sells rebranded HGST (formerly known as hitachi) as their enterprise Gold drives because even they recognize that they are more reliable. Perhaps you're thinking of Seagate who makes the cheap drives that constantly fail?
Click to expand...

No, I'm indeed talking about Hitatchi drives, they are cheap, crap, unreliable and are widely used because they are cheap for laptop manufacturers to throw into laptops. 20+ years experience shows me they are junk!
 
JaredDM

JaredDM

Active Member
Well, that's your personal experience and has little to no relevance to real-world statistics. Those of us who work in data recovery and can collect data on failure rates of thousands of drives all agree that HGST and Toshiba are the most reliable 2.5" drives.

Just FYI all laptop drives will have failure rates 10x higher than desktop drives because the spinning platter / gliding head mechanics are not well suited to environments where movement is a factor. Laptop manufacturers like to use Toshiba and HGST drives because it decreases their rates of RMA. If they put Seagates in there they'd have 5x more coming back DOA.
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
JaredDM said:
Well, that's your personal experience and has little to no relevance to real-world statistics. Those of us who work in data recovery and can collect data on failure rates of thousands of drives all agree that HGST and Toshiba are the most reliable 2.5" drives.

Just FYI all laptop drives will have failure rates 10x higher than desktop drives because the spinning platter / gliding head mechanics are not well suited to environments where movement is a factor. Laptop manufacturers like to use Toshiba and HGST drives because it decreases their rates of RMA. If they put Seagates in there they'd have 5x more coming back DOA.
Click to expand...

Well, sorry I'm not a data recovery engineer like you.. :rolleyes:
 
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