Hard Drive in Dell Laptop ceased working. Anyway to retrieve data?

Hi All,

Recently my dell laptop froze while it was on, I wasn't doing any work on it at the time, it was on the desk near me just turned on. The HD started making some weird noises, clicking etc, then it went to a blue screen and I had to restart it. It wouln't boot up, couldn't find a bootable disk, so the HD is looking like it's been corrupted some how.

Anyboy know if I've any chance of retrieving the data? If so how do i go about it?

Thanks
M

Some excellent advice in this thread.

See my post here, the rest of that thread and there should also be other threads dealing with hard disk emergency data recovery. If you need any specific advice let me know and I'll try to help as I have been through this particular mill a few times now.

Post crossed with CCOVICH's.

The clicking noise is a particularly bad sign.

At best - it is the heads moving back and forward retrying a bad sector, but you already know you have bad sectors.

At worst - it is the heads making contact with the disks/platters and since disks don't do the contact thing and live to tell the tale very well you may lose all the data.

See the other threads for suggestions, but your best bet basically is to stick the disk into another machine and copy all the sectors off the bad disk. Then work *using the copy* on getting the files recovered. If you work with the bad disk more than necessary you will continue to damage it.

z