Crashed/Flakey Laptop Hard Drive -- proper recovery steps..?

[emiliew]

I can't seem to find any specific information online about the particular issue I'm having with my drive and what to do about it. I'm trying to diagnose, understand, and potentially fix (with the proper recovery software) the problem myself before continuing to the $400+ data recovery route.

I was saving a jpg to my Toshiba M205 Tablet PC (..still under warranty, running XP, with a 60 gig Toshiba brand drive..) when it suddenly crashed and rebooted itself, or tried to reboot itself i should say. After a while of sitting at the initial boot-up screen, it simply errors out saying: "A DISK ERROR HAS OCCURRED, PRESS CTRL-ALT-DEL TO REBOOT"

so I did that a couple times in vain, although after letting it sit for a while (since there were no clicking or strange noises coming from the drive I figured it was probably ok to let it spin..) it eventually progressed to the Windows XP splash boot-up screen, although Windows never actually booted.

I then hooked up the drive to a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter with USB adapter on my desktop machine. Windows recognized and correctly identified the drive, however it was extremely sluggish to open and browse.. eventually I was able to explore the drive and see the correct file structure/files on it, but after about only 2-5 minuets of this odd sluggish behavior the drive disappeared from Windows and acted as if i'd unplugged the USB device, even though the drive was still attached and spinning.

This flaky behavior has me worried, and I dont know if this sounds like something commercial recovery software could even truly address. Honestly i'm not entirely sure what is really happening either, at first I assumed mbr issues, or bad sectors, or a number of other common HDD issues i've been reading about ...? any ideas?

 

[emiliew]

ok quick update - i tried connecting the drive to my desktop machine again, to see if i could actually recover some of my files.. it tried to copy things over, but never actually did, and seemingly locked up (although did not disappear completely as it did before)

Well, it also made a high pitched beep sound in the process, which i assume was to warn or notify me of some kind of pertinent problem with the drive. i promptly stopped the hardware via windows then unplugged the drive.. yikes, now what!

 

[micker377]

Possibly a bearing seizing up. Try putting the hard drive (in a plastic baggy) in the freezer for a couple of hours (no, I'm not crazy - at least in this respect). Be prepared to quickly copy off any data you need. May work - can't hurt!

 

[emiliew]

i did actually try that since it worked on a drive i had five or six years ago, but it is still doing the same thing, initially the computer recognizes it, and i can browse around (very slowly and sluggishly) but when i attempt to copy something off of it, the thing disappears from windows and it pops up a "delayed write error" or something to that effect.

 

[micker377]

Can you hook it up (with adapter), to the desktop and run chkdsk? How important is the data on this drive? You mention that it is still under warranty, can't you just return the whole thing?