2.5" HDD problem

[Kiro-San]

I've been asked to take a look at a laptop HD that has potentially died. I don't under what circumstances the drive went bad, just that the laptop was turned on one day and wouldn't boot. Quick trip to a PC store and the drive is out and into a caddy, but no joy.

The drive is a Hitachi DK23EA-30 (30gb) and the USB/IDE bridge is some cheap thing from Lexcron. Plugging the device into my computer reveals a USB mass storage device with a "Generic USB Disk USB Device" under it, but no volume and the drive doesn't appear in My Computer or under removable storage in the computer management msc. I had thought about plugging it into my computer directly, but of course the cables are utterly different. I'm going to put it back in the laptop tomorrow and attempt to the boot the laptop off a CD with drive fitness test on it. Hopefully it's still going to be seen by the laptops BIOS.

Apart from that, does anyone have any ideas or suggestions (apart from specialist data recovery agents) on how to get the data off the drive. It's very important to the drives owner.

[dave87]

Does windows recognise the drive and just show no valid partitions, or does it not show the drive at all?

[killie99]

What OS was on the drive?
Cables to connect laptop drives to a standard IDE M/B connector are readily available on ebay for a few pounds, this will at least let you see if the BIOS detects the drive and will let you access the drive under Windows, if it's still operational but has some corrupt data, to recover the data. If the drive has gone completely bad you are probably looking at a specialist company to rocover the data - and you're talking several hundreds of pounds to do that.

[Kiro-San]

The drive had XP home on it. I'll look into getting a cable cheers for the heads up on it.

[Akira]

I've managed to see drives that XP misses by using a Linux Live Distro. If you get Linux Magazine at the mo' it has Knoppix Live on the cover DVD.

Pop this in, reboot, let it load up and then see if it's been able to mount the offending drive.

Other than this get something like this: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/2-5-Laptop-HDD...QQcmdZViewItem

[ash_rm]

Hook the drive up with the IDE cable as killie99 mentioned. Then try using Ontrack Easy Recovery or somthing like that.

If you choose to read the hard drive in RAW mode it will try and recover the data even if there are no accessible partitions.

[Kiro-San]

Thanks for the software suggestion. I've got the adaptor now so I'll give that a go.

[UniRecovery]

Is the drive spinning or not? If it is spinning, then there isa strong likelyhood that the head is damaged. Whereas if the drive is not spinning it indicates an electronic fault.