Laptop Froze - Dead HD - Get back data

A

andantesash

Member
My laptop froze up earlier, so I restarted it with the power button as I couldnt do anything. But when it loaded back up in Vista it came up and said it could not find the operating system or a partition, so I checked the bios and nothing is there for the hard drive.

I am going to have to bite the bullet and get a new hard drive for it tomorrow, but I have important files on it that I was working on 5 minutes before it happened - how do I get them back in a recovery program with it being a laptop? What do I have to get to get it to read it?

Thanks
 
What you're saying is kind of contradicting itself; booting to Vista but can't find an OS. Is it saying this right after the POST/BIOS/Splash screen?

Depending on the computer, it may have a recovery partition or an actual restore CD. Hopefully, you have an actual Windows CD. If this is the case, try booting to the CD and running Windows Repair...

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html

If this still doesn't work, you could try CHKDSK and/or fixmbr

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/fix-mbr-xp-vista/

If you don't want to try fixing the drive, it recovering the data from the old drive shouldn't be too hard, but it really depends on the severity of the damage. Since the machine runs Vista, I'd assume the drive is SATA. It should fit right into your desktop (assuming it too has SATA). If the data isn't totally corrupted, it should pop up as an additional hard drive and allow you to copy whatever you want off the drive.

Also, it's possible to run repair tools from your desktop with the drive in the computer, such as fixmbr or chkdsk
 
Thanks for the reply, I meant it was booting past the bios screen and then just coming up with the operating system cannot be found etc.

So I went and got a new hard drive yesterday, and I also have a Winstars Sata Hard Drive Docking Station which fits my laptop hard drive (the dead one) but I have plugged it in and turned it on and its just making like a ticking noise (like a clock) and it doesnt appear on the computer like it normally would do with other hard drives.

Any suggestions on what I can do, really need the files.
 
If the drive is clicking, then most likely that drive is shot. However, a long time ago, I was told that its possible to revive a drive temporarily by putting it in the freezer for awhile and then trying it again. You might want to research online before you try this though as I can't remember how long it was supposed to stay in the freezer.
 
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