Hard drive buzzing, blue screen, os not found

[arid]

Hi,

For several weeks now I have been working on my Sony Vaio laptop (or have come back to it) and the hard drive area begins buzzing (you can feel it and hear it through the casing). The screen then goes blue and I get:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer...KERNEL_DATA_IMPASSE_ERROR...atapi.sys...Beginning dump of physical memory.

When I restart, the hardrive area immediately begins humming, and I get an OS not found error.

If I put the laptop away for about 48 hours and don't touvh it it WILL WORK FINE for a couple days, then do the same thing. Any suggestions you may have would be great. Thanks in advance.

 

[garebo]

Seems to me the hard drive is on the way out (going bad).
Does the bios have s.m.a.r.t and if so is it enabled?
Smart, when existing in the bios and enabled, will tell you if the hard drive is in bad condition and about to die on you.
You can buy or borrow a converter for the hard drive to enable you to put it on a standard pc ide channel and try and get any data you want to get from the drive.


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