Thread: HDD Troubles

So my friend accidentally stepped on her laptop the other day. Since then, when you boot it up it just gets to the HP boot options screen, sit for a few seconds, and restart in an infinite loop. The HDD is making a sort of clicking sound. I figure its pretty much done for, but is there any way possible of recovering data from the HDD? She's got no problem buying a replacement, but her biggest concern is obviously all her stuff. Thanks for any help, guys.

First of all, tell fatty to watch where she's walking.

Now that we have that out of the way, you can actually try picking up an external hard drive enclosure that supports IDE and SATA (since you did not specify which kind of drive it is, get one for both). You can install the drive into the enclosure and hook it up to a desktop or laptop via USB, firewire, esata, etc. The system will recognize the enclosure like a USB thumb drive.

Since it is clicking, chances are it will not be easy to retrieve data. Hopefully it's not completely dead.

Good luck!

This isn't going to help you, but in Iraq I dropped my laptop about 10 too many times, and the last time I did it, it did just about the same thing. Sent it home to dad, he tried what he could and figured it was just done. Opened it up, and the tiny read/write head on the drive had actually broken off of the arm.

Originally Posted by TPLefever

This isn't going to help you, but in Iraq I dropped my laptop about 10 too many times, and the last time I did it, it did just about the same thing. Sent it home to dad, he tried what he could and figured it was just done. Opened it up, and the tiny read/write head on the drive had actually broken off of the arm.

Yeah thats what the clicking usually means, that the head is damaged. I'm going to try putting it in my external HDD case and if that doesn't work, I'll try the freezing trick.