Stupidly left my laptop on the sofa earlier and caught my 2 year old bashing the top of it with a large plastic toy. Now when i turn it on there is a chirpy like noise coming from the hard drive and wont boot. It wont even go into the F2 setup or F12 boot options.
Typically the laptop (Dell) is 1 month out of warranty too.
Is the hard drive likely to be totally goosed??
I know its pretty simple to whip out the HD but how hard is it gonna be to recover any data from it and re-install windows without any disks (pretty sure i never got any from dell when i bought it).
Should i just take it into the local repair shop or is this something that i can fix myself? Help!

Do you have any backups at all?

(if not, you will next time…)

Rachel

Depends how much pain you want. local repair is easiest.

Otherwise as a first pass try opening the appropriate back covers and reseating the memory and hard drive. It’s unlikely but it may work.

If the laptop was running when it got hit then you may just have trashed a small part of the disk. To recover it though you would need a caddy to hold the disk so you could connect it to another computer to try to recover it.

Alternatively you might be able to make a bootable USB disk with a flavor of Linux and use that to check it.

In reality just try the first suggestion and if that doesn’t work stick it in a shop and go for a ride instead 🙂

Luckily theres not that much on it.. its used more as a spare to use anywhere round the house for work type stuff and internet browsing

How much is a 500gb HD and windows 7 re-install likely to cost?

Sorry, I don’t know the answer to that. It will depend a bit on whether you made recovery DVDs when you first got the machine. If you did then it is a relatively easy job. If you didn’t then it will take a lot longer as they will have to hunt down all the appropriate drivers for your machine. It may even be worth giving dell a call to see how much they charge.

Sorry can’t be of more help. However if the laptop was switched off or asleep when it got hit then definitely try reseating the HDD and memory as the HDD head should have been parked so should n’t have been able to cause damage

my old laptop drive started failing and windows wouldn’t boot, reporting a disk error, so I took it out and put it into my desktop pc as a second drive, and was able to get all my stuff off it. Then I just googled the model of the hard drive and bought one for about £30, and reinstalled Bindows.

Is it worth buying a 2.5 sata hdd-usb enclosure first for a few quid and seeing if i can get stuff off that way?

I used to be a ‘data recovery technician ‘.Yes sticking the drive in a caddy and seeing if it will read is the first port of call. Or if you don’t have a caddy/spare PC using a bootable linux cd.

If you can read it, you can clone the drive (using something like clonezilla) and write it onto a new drive. Or at least get the data off it.

http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm
http://clonezilla.org/

If (and it sounds likely from what you have said) the head is well and truly knackered, the platters
(disks inside), can be removed, put into an identical drive and read.

Unfortunately, you can’t do this yourself as you need a clean room, and is also quite expensive.

Depends how much your data is worth to you, but it is recoverable.