Grind, Grind, Grind goes the Hard Drive

March 14, 2008 9:38 AM

Can this laptop be saved? All was good. Then it sounded like there was a part loose and rolling around inside my laptop for a few seconds. The hard drive started running slooowwwly with some additional crunching and grinding noises. On reboot I got an I/0 error then a no bootable drive error.

This is a spare l laptop that I keep for friends to use when they hang out at my house. It's a 4 year old Dell Latitude 600 running Windows 2000. Also, it's been used hard. It was dropped a few weeks ago and I had to open up the machine to reseat the some of the connections to the PCMCIA card to make the wireless work. I wish I could tell you that's the first time this laptop was dropped.

Files are all backed up on my external hard drive, but not the operating system or applications.

Can it be saved and is it worth the bother?

posted by 26.2 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Pop on eBay and see what replacement hard drives for that model are going for. Odds are that everything else is fine if just the hard drive went.
posted by onalark at 9:46 AM on March 14

Turn it off. Leave it off. Take it to a repair place, and get them to open it up and remove the loose part.

As long as it's in there, running it is a risk of causing permanent fatal damage to the electronics. You may already have done so, in fact.
posted by Class Goat at 9:47 AM on March 14

Ouch....get a cheap-ish laptop hard drive and toss the old one. Reinstall.

I think it's pretty cool that you've got a spare for friends to use.
posted by notsnot at 9:47 AM on March 14

Sounds very much like the hard-drive has crashed, if you've got it backed up, just bin it and get a new one, won't cost very much at all. 4 year old laptop would be a 2.5" ATA (Not SATA).

Dell's usually come with a little black adapter on the end of the hard-disk, to help it slot into the system's connector, so when you throw it out, check if it has one and remember to take it off and use it on the new one.

Also, get a LiveCD of Ubuntu (or similar) that will run your computer without the hard-disk-- should help confirm that everything else is running fine.
posted by Static Vagabond at 9:48 AM on March 14

Yeah, it sounds like your hard drive had a head crash, which would mean it's toast — tiny bits of twisted metal, oxide scraped off the platters, nothing recoverable without heroic measures. But that probably wouldn't harm anything else in the laptop. Buy a new drive, restore from backup, and you should be fine.
posted by hattifattener at 12:04 PM on March 14

The drive has died. Replace drive and reinstall the OS and backups.
posted by Kioki-Silver at 1:14 PM on March 14

I think it's pretty cool that you've got a spare for friends to use.

Your friends come to your house to use your laptop? You guys need some hobbies. Board games, maybe?

I'll guess that the rattling-around sound was just the hard drive itself, not some loose part inside the actual case. When disks crash hard, they sound like coins in the clothes dryer, and they're almost always write-offs after that.

Vag's suggestion about checking the old HD for adapters is clever. Probably best to not take out the old one until you're holding the replacement, of course. Or use any tech shop to swap in a new drive you supply if you don't trust yourself with teeny tiny screwdriver surgery. Laptops are made with watch parts, I swear.
posted by rokusan at 2:25 PM on March 14

FWIW---if the drive is kaput and you need data off of it, you might be able to get 15-20 minutes of access by putting it in a baggie in the freezer for 24 hours or so right before plugging it back in.
posted by TomMelee at 6:26 PM on March 14