Laptop Hard Drive Crash - Comments Page 1

seems like it would be best policy to never move or tip up a desktop computer that is powered up. better to wait till power is off to baby the hard drive.

WOW...we learn something new every day. This is VERY INFORMATIVE & helpful to me. Sometimes I walk from room to room with it in my arms "sideways". I didn't realize I was being "abusive" to my laptop. I've had it a year now and haven't had any problems but I know NOW, I must be more careful.

Gibson Research Corporation (GRC for short) has a pretty good utility called SpinRite. It's a hard disk scanning and data recovery utility that's been around since 1988. If used on a working hard drive it can analyze and predict a pending failure. If used on a drive that's already crashed, it has a pretty amazing record of recovering data and repairing the drive. It's not cheap ($89. for first time buyers) but it saved my irreplaceable data on several occasions (XP Pro laptop.) I have no personal experience using it on Vista or 7.

http://www.grc.com/sroverview.htm

I just replaced my laptop 160GB (7200) with a 500GB (7200) because of space, but performance had gone so bad boot time to ready was almost 30 minutes (Dell/XP) after an easy upgrade using the Apricorn wire device I replaced the drives, rebooted and was running in less than 2 minutes. Software? Hardware? MUST be hardware since the SOFTWARE was exactly the same (Backup/Restore), Ran all the diagnostics but no errors. When (not if) I have time will run stress tests on old drive. BUT the new drive only cost $100 at Frys so who cares about the old 160GB...

Hi storageman

what you experienced was probably nothing more than extreme fragmentation of the drive, scattering files into several pieces. Even worse if the page file is fragmented as regular defrag tools won't touch it (I use pagedefrag from sysinternals). I once had a page file fragmented into 4000 pieces, sometimes nothing responded for minutes. Ran pagedefrag a few times, in conjunction with a good defragger to get clear space and now it is hugely better.

You didn't mention the SSD (Solid State Drive).
My Netbook came with one, and proved to be very valuable. I dropped it while it was running, creating a nasty dent in one corner, but there was no ill effect at all.

Solid State Drives (SSDs)do not fit in this article as they do not have the moving parts which create the problems related here by Bob. SSDs are indeed superior to the HDDs in use today, not only for the safety of drops or not possessing moving parts to wear out, but also because they are faster with reads/writes and degrade much slower which keeps data safer in storage far longer.

However, SSDs are cost prohibitive, as most major advances in computer hardware. As time goes by SSDs will most likely one day replace the ones in use today, but until then only individuals with lots of money can afford to fully implement SSD technology. Some companies are integrating a small (16 gigabytes or less) along side larger traditional drives. This provides some of the benefits of SSDs while keeping cost down.

I recently went to power up my laptop, and my hard drive was not recognized. Long story short, I went to reformat the hard drive with my system restore disk, and it didn't even recognize that the hard drive existed. I went and bought a new hard drive, formatted it and I am up and running with the new one. I bought a hard drive usb docking station with hopes that I could pull all the information off of it to my new hard drive, but it still does not recognize the hard drive, even when I try on other computers.
I had all my information backed up on an external hard drive, but the funny thing is that when I plug it in to any computer now, the external hard drive is not recognized either. It appears I have very bad luck, but I am hoping somebody might know of some way that I can recover my data off one of the 2 drives.

I'm not sure if it is my hard drive or not, but when I turn on my Gateway desktop computer not signal is getting to the monitor. At least that is what the message on the monitor says "no signal." The light on the power button keeps blinking, and I don't remember if it always did that after I turn on the computer.

The fan for the processor is blowing, and the DVD drive doors open and close, so I'm assuming there is power to the computer. If there is power to the computer, and the hard drive crashes shouldn't there be some sort of signal getting to the monitor.

Could it be that the battery for the cmos needs to be replaced? I don't know where to start. I don't want to start buying new parts only to find out that it was something else. Does anyone have any suggestions?

thanks

Hi, my laptop toshiba Satellite L300D, just turned off, and when i tried turning it back on, itr came on thge setup menu with the following: hard dik drive-none and no booting options. No recovery CD was delivered at purchase, so i tried to boot with a windows vista clean CD to no avail, any suggestions please, i have a feeling i lost all data:(
thanks for any suggestions

I like it! I have a 120 gigs laptop that I got for study in college. I still have my desktop hard drive that is also 120 gigs. My cousin used the other parts to build a computer for his friend .Anyway; I am running out of storage on my 120 laptop hard drive and want to use the 120 desktop hard drives as an external instead of backing everything up onto DVDs or CDs. Is it possible? If so please add a website where I can purchase one of these cables.

EDITOR'S NOTE: It's not so much a cable you want, as an external enclosure kit. See http://askbobrankin.com/convert_internal_hard_drive_to_external.html