I noticed yesterday that my HD on my toshiba laptop won't stop spinning, as if it is loading a heavy program in the background even though that i'm not. I scanned my HD for viruses and it came up empty, left my laptop open for like 6 hours and when I came back I found the computer is halting right when the bios is about to load up.

I restarted my laptop and my windows XP SP2 started to load but in the middle of the loading the laptop restarted by itself , same thing happens when I try to enter safe mode . I suspected that the hard disk is going to die because I sarted to hear strange loud sound coming from there when my laptop is on.

I loaded my SP2 cd and tried to run the chkdsk from there , but it won't run and prints out a message saying that chkdsk can't recover deleted files or something like that.

I used your utility ,but I can't see the c:\ drive . I ran testdisk and I loaded the cd with the drivers folder.

Please guy I need your help ASAP, I feel like my HD will die on me if I can't get help soon.

um if it's clicking and making strange noises you can hang it up already. It's dead.

Also a sure fire lets say second opinion is the fact that ubcd4win cant even see the drive. This means the bios in your alptop does not see it. This will most likely only be caused by to things.

1) a dead hard drive
2) a bad main board in your laptop.

Since the hard drive is making strange noises I would guess it a bad hard drive. And honestly a bad hard drive is way cheaper than a dead main board.

Hi dpanet

If you have access to a working PC and you know the make of hard disk I suggest you go to the makers web site and down load their bootable diagnostic disk.
Most makers licence a version of the same program but it is tied to their own disks.
This will quickly tell you if the disk is physicaly damaged or software corrupt..

One aquaintance got through two hard disks in six months, they died slowly, taking about a hour to boot up then seeming to work correctly.

I hope you have backed up you disk.

BUT if not and there is valuable data on it, leave the laptop switched off. get an expert to deal with the recovery. Most recovery software deals with corrupted or erased disks not physically damaged disks.

regards

Mike Barnes

If it's dead because of heat putting it in a airtight back and putting it in the freezer may give you long enough to get the data off. I've used this trick several times myself and it can work.

Do so at your own risk

I've used this trick myself and it really does work most of the time but you should also know that this will also ruin the drive and it should never be used for anything important again (even if it seems to still work) so before freezing it, make sure that the drive is in fact physically damaged or that the data on it is more important than the price of a new drive.

I suggest using SPINRITE on the drive before freezing it.

Tom