My IBM laptop died a month ago. Well, sort of. It locked up while I was surfing the web one day, and after trying every other standard way to get it going, I powered it down.
Not good. When I powered it up, the disk began to make that famous clicking sound that indicates a big problem with the hard drive. When the computer tried to boot, it told me “operating system not found”.
not good. So I took it to a local place that does trouble shooting of this sort. After about an hour of trying, the guy told me that it didn’t look like the hard drive was getting any power at all, and that if I replaced the do-hickey that was bad, I would probably be able to either have the disk work, or at the minimum retrieve my data. He told me to look on ebay for the same model disk, change out the part, and give it a go.
Is this even possible? Highly improbable? I have some personal items on the disk, pictures, music, whatnot… but I’m not too keen on sending it to one of those ultra expensive data retrieval outlets just yet. So any hope here?
Also, as an aside, is it really catastrophic to disassemble a harddrive and put it back together? Assuming I don’t scratch the disk, and know what I’m doing, will a speck or two of dust really make it inoperable? Or is this just an urban legend? Every one I ask has never tried it, but they always say not to do it. Only sanitized labs can do it.
Hopefully you don’t have to do that, though there are ways to do that successfully. Back when the biggest drive available was 2 gigs (and I had a piddly 500M), someone gave me a 1 gig HD with a few bad sectors on it. After a few months of it growing a few more, I got sick of nursing it and tried to copy some of the data off again. It wasn’t co-operating, so I took the top off and blew on it or poked it every time it threatened to lock up. It still kinda worked, and I got some fragments of files off of it, but it got retired to launching koosh balls after that day. I say if you’re going to be careful about taking it apart and putting it back together, and you only care about short-term functionality, go right ahead.
There are some types of hardware failure you can fix yourself. If the platter, spindle, motor, head or armature have problems, you may as well toss it. If the problem is with the electronics, you can typically disconnect the HD PCB from the rest of the disk, and replace it with one from a HD of the same model. You then cross your fingers, power it up, and sometimes you get your data back.
If it’s got a stiction problem with the motor not spinning up, putting it in an external case and either smacking it, shaking it, or poking the end of the spindle shaft that extends out the bottom of the drive sometimes gets it going one last time.
I’d recommend you give it a shot, as there’s not much to lose at this point. (And I just had to re-write some of this 'cause I can’t find a drive to check it on, but I have a feeling the PCB on notebook-style HDs might double as one side of the case).
If the hard drive is “clicking” it’s getting power, but some mechanism is damaged or the platter is corrupted beyond reading. “Clicking” hard drive failures are not because the drive isn’t “getting power” it sounds like the guy pulled that out of his ass. You can sometimes accurately diagnose hard drive error modes but doing this requires special equipment that attaches to the drive. Anything else speculating on the precise failure mode, esp while the unit is in the notebook is a WAG.
Disassembling a notebook drive then swapping out the controller board might be possible if you can find the exact same model and size drive, but you may need very tinx torx heads or other special tools to do this and success is not guaranteed unless it is actually the controller board (which don’t usually fail all that often) and not some other component.
Your best best re seeing if the drive is actually defective and not crippled by an underlying notebook issue is to get a 2.5>3.5 drive adapter for $ 10 or so, remove the notebook drive and slave it (you may need to change drive jumpers) to a desktop PC. If it boots remove your data, get anew notebook HD and reinstall the OS and data.