HDD totally quit need help recovering data from it.

I got a call from a woman here in town that said her acer aspire 7741z laptop crashed and asked if i could come over and fix it. When i got there it was at a dos prompt which said "no operating system found"

So i asked her how and what happened prior to this. She said she was on her laptop downloading some font packages....because she has a sign design company from her house. and the computer hard locked. she proceded to press the power button untill it shut off and hit again to restart and it was there it sat.

Up to this point i have opend the back and verified it is a WD Blue 250Gb sata HD. I didnt notice any smell or liquid stains around or on the HD. I checked connections and tryed to boot into Ultimate Boot CD and check from there. UBCD and the BIOS are both showing no HD at all.

Does anyone know of any tricks i could try to get this to work long enough to get in and pull info off? She is a recently widowed woman and this laptop has all of her photos of her decesed husband on it. and yes she has no backup atm....

Pull the drive and try it in a new computer as a secondary drive first thing I'd try.

As a last resort you could put it in the freezer and then when it's good and cold install on the laptop and see if you can get the pictures out fast on to a thumb drive if it works.

Also I fixed a drive with a hard smack into my hand.

are the sata connections the same on an latop as it is on a 3.5"?

Do you have a way to hook it up to a regular computer? I know on a previous laptop I got some water in it and it would say that no hard drive was attached. However, the hard drive still worked and I could get it to boot if I started the onboard diagnostic, but quit out once it started.

Just want to rule out it being the laptop. If it is the hard drive that is not starting up, then there's a couple things. One is the freezer trick. Other is the board is fried and you can replace it with the exact same board off another laptop hard drive. Luckily used laptop hard drives are usually very cheap.

If it does start up, I'd pull all the data off. If it's corrupted, then I'd make a full disc image and work with that instead of the drive.

i pulled it and placed it into my daughters laptop and im getting a loud clicking , but it is still showing up as no HD.....i believe its the click of death....but im gonna try the freezer before i give up.

just took it out of the freezer... nothing.

Did you try slapping it in your hand?

Another option is data recovery specialist... but your going to pay $$$ for that :/

NiteSmoker17 said:

are the sata connections the same on an latop as it is on a 3.5"?

Click to expand...

Yes. So you can try it in a desktop.

Another option is to upsell her on a build for a local system for backups, as well as a remote system for secondary backups, so that this won't happen again.

Put it in a desktop as a secondary drive to make absolutely certain it isn't getting detected.