i busted my hard drive!

[sereia 0]

i tried to set my laptop down gently and it slipped out of my hand and hit the table hard.

now my computer is broken.

spent hours on the phone with dell support and nada.

they said i can get a cable to try and salvage any files from my hard drive before i reformat it.

is this a relatively easy task? my brother says i should UPS my laptop to him and let him do it, but is that necessary? can i do this myself? i am able to follow directions easily...but i certainly can't do it on my own.

any advice?

[homesick_american 1]

i tried to set my laptop down gently and it slipped out of my hand and hit the table hard.

now my computer is broken.

spent hours on the phone with dell support and nada.

they said i can get a cable to try and salvage any files from my hard drive before i reformat it.

is this a relatively easy task? my brother says i should UPS my laptop to him and let him do it, but is that necessary? can i do this myself? i am able to follow directions easily...but i certainly can't do it on my own.

any advice?

If you don't know how to do it, it's a task best left to professionals. If you've damaged your hard drive you may find it difficult to pull data off of it. When you say "broken" what exactly do you mean by that?

[Jamie76 0]

If you are close to a Radio Shack, you could take it there for a technician to look at. They also make cases you can put your internal hard drive in to make it an external storage device. You then hook this external hard drive to another computer via usb and you can extract the files from there as needed. That is if you didn't do some internal damage to your hard drive.

[sereia 0]

i find it amazing i did such damage by just barely hitting it on a table. its not like i dropped it from standing up or something!

when i say broken i mean i loaded windows normally....but it took almost 4x as long. then it shut down and opened a blue window saying it shut down windows to prevent damage. and now it won't open windows at all.

the dell support guy walked me through a lot of steps and nothing worked. he said the next thing would be to try to extract the files with the USB cable. i did not, however, tell him i dropped it. i didn't want to get my warrenty messed up. but does that even matter? i tried unscrewing the hard drive on my own and putting it back in and that didn't help either. should i unscrew the whole back and see if the memory card is dislodged? or would that have nothing to do with it?

[homesick_american 1]

If you are close to a Radio Shack, you could take it there for a technician to look at. They also make cases you can put your internal hard drive in to make it an external storage device. You then hook this external hard drive to another computer via usb and you can extract the files from there as needed. That is if you didn't do some internal damage to your hard drive.

That's what I'm concerned about; she says her computer is 'broken' and she wants to reformat the drive, and I'm imagining that she can't get it to boot. If she dropped it and now can't get it to boot, I'd wager that her HD is damaged and a reformat won't fix the damage. A skilled technician could format around the damage, but it's time consuming and expensive and sometimes it's easier to just get a new HD.

i find it amazing i did such damage by just barely hitting it on a table. its not like i dropped it from standing up or something!

when i say broken i mean i loaded windows normally....but it took almost 4x as long. then it shut down and opened a blue window saying it shut down windows to prevent damage. and now it won't open windows at all.

the dell support guy walked me through a lot of steps and nothing worked. he said the next thing would be to try to extract the files with the USB cable. i did not, however, tell him i dropped it. i didn't want to get my warrenty messed up. but does that even matter? i tried unscrewing the hard drive on my own and putting it back in and that didn't help either. should i unscrew the whole back and see if the memory card is dislodged? or would that have nothing to do with it?

If you take the computer apart yourself you may void your warranty.

[sereia 0]

okay then nevermind. lol i guess maybe i should mail it to my bro and see if he can fix it. this sounds out of my league huh?

[Jamie76 0]

Just take it to a tech to see what they say. If the hard drive is damaged, you will need a new one. There is still a possibility they can pull data off of it depending on the damage. When you dropped it, there is always the possibility that you jarred something loose...a small possibilty but something that should be investigated and which a tech could find out for sure.

[homesick_american 1]

okay then nevermind. lol i guess maybe i should mail it to my bro and see if he can fix it. this sounds out of my league huh?

I would guess that there are places in NYC that will do it for you for a fee. Why don't you call around and try them?

Dell is sort of known for its less-than-stellar tech support. About 10 years ago, you could get one of their people to actually COME TO YOUR HOUSE to fix your computer. Then they outsourced everything.

[sereia 0]

ya the guy on the phone had a HEAVY accent. sounded filipino to me.

[homesick_american 1]

ya the guy on the phone had a HEAVY accent. sounded filipino to me.

Dell has big call centers in India. I dunno about the Philippines.

Personally, I would not buy a Dell. Their service sucks, you can get better quality for less money, and they keep killing off their US workforce to ship their jobs off to India. I feel bad for Austin; the city depends a lot on Dell and the company will, eventually, screw the city over.

[Dan J 277]

With dell computers there are things that are user serviceable such as the hard drive. With the computer off, you need to remove the cover where your hard drive is, and then pull it out. Laptop hard drives may or may not be able to connect to a PC. If you can, you can connect it to your PC and copy all the files off. Otherwise you probably want to get an external enclosure to put the hard drive into and then plug it into another computer via USB/Firewire.

If you dont know what your doing, I highly suggest finding somone to do it for you. Otherwise you may end up loosing everything.

[William33 110]

Have you tried using the "recovery console"?

When your machine boots up to the Dell screen, hit F2

In the Bios screen, change the order of the devices, to have the CDROM boot first.

Insert the Windows disk and navigate to the "recovery console".

On the DOS prompt, select “help”, this will offer available DOS prompts. Select, for example, "FIXBOOT".

That helped me before.

Another thing to try...When the machine is booting up, and apparently hanging, does the drive have a consistent "wurring sound"?

If so, the drive is hosed.

With that said, data recovery from a damaged HD is definitely something you cannot do without experience.

Further, data recovery services will cost more than the laptop.

When my Dell laptop HD failed most recently, I got a new one, formatted it and here I am. Fortunately, I backed up critical data.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

In the future get a backup drive and this won't happen again.

[Dan J 277]

Yes its possible that the drive is damaged and further usage of it will only compound the problem. While drives are built to withstand quite a bit of shock, its ussualy only when its off. A drive thats on, has alot lower shock threashold.

Services like Ontrack can be very expensive. With no gaurentee of any data even being recovered, as it depends on the type of damage.

Its a little too late now, but generally your best off backing up your data on a regular basis. If you want automatic and remote backup, check out something like Mozy.