Hard drive bust

[Toky]

Sitting tonight on my laptop, I heard va clickking noise then the screen went black. Tried switching laptop off and then on again. Message said operating system cant be found.
Will I be able to recover any of my data or photos if I take to a repair shop?

[Scunner]

Doesn't sound good Tokes - those clicks are sadly normally the last breaths of a hard drive. Don't throw it away though. If you take it to a computer repair company they can run some diagnostic tests on the drive and even if it is deed they may be able to save some of your files/photos. Also for future, hard drives are relatively cheap now so a new one in your current laptop will be much cheaper than buying a new laptop.

Oh, and the most irritating advice for future when things go wrong with computers - back everything up regularly - a lesson we only learn on days like this!!!

[JohnF]

Is there anything on the drive that is kinda essential?  This might sound a bit weird, but if there is and you want to have a stab at getting it back without paying megabucks to the HDD recovery companies, then wack it in the freezer for 30/45 mins then put back in machine.  You may get 5/10mins worth of activity.  Then you may not.  But its worth a tickle.

JF

[Toky]

Oh boo hoo, I had hoped for better news.
I'm taking it today to a fairly local repeair shop to see what they can do. I haven't ever backed anything up....lesson learnt.
I have hundreds of photos in folders that I really need to recover and some very important docs.
Oh I could weep buckets at this.!
Will try freezer as last resort JohnF.

[JohnF]

If you've got someone a wee bit computer savvy that can help then try downloading this boot cd, it doesn't need the hard drive to load an operating system.  That way you can often copy over to a USB stick recoverable files and folders even if Windows doesn't work.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

JF

[Toky]

Brilliant, thank you very much.