Acer 5741g hard drive failure won't boot, cycling on and off

Acer 5741g, Win64 home premium, 4GB ram, Hitachi HTS5459b9a300 500GB hard drive, BIOS version 1.23

A few weeks ago, hard drive crashed, which i thought was due to it losing battery power during a windows update. I created a Windows recovery disk from a similar laptop, ultimately had to use a recovery from the PQservice partition to get the computer operating - wouldn't do system restore, start-up repair wouldn't work, etc., then had issues with being able to apply Windows updates (Service Pack 1).

The hard drive crashed again, would get past BIOS and then sit with a blank screen. I could boot with the Windows recovery disk. It would not find an operating system to repair. At command prompt, it would not switch drives from x: to c: or d:, returning an I/O error.

After another boot attempt to the Recovery disk, went to "start-up repair" and it did seem to at least see the hard drive, since it indicated that it was repairing disk errors and the process could take over an hour, which of course is an understatement. Went to bed. This morn it indicated that it was finished, to restart the computer, and if it was fixed, it would start windows normally, if not, the repair was not successful.

So I restart the computer, and it starts cycling - get a flash of the BIOS screen, it thinks for a couple seconds, then shuts down and restarts! It will do that over and over. It is not allowing me to hit F2 even to get into the BIOS, seems to cycle too fast or not get to that point, although I do see the F2 prompt at the bottom of the screen. The only way to stop the cycling is to remove the power cord and pop out the battery to kill it.

I didn't have much time to fiddle with it this morning, but I did try removing the hard drive completely. When it boots, it doesn't show the BIOS screen but it does start loading files from the Windows recovery CD that's in the optical drive, like I'd expect it to if i had instructed the computer to boot from the optical drive. The optical drive is the first boot device, but normally you still have to press a key to make it boot from there, otherwise it will still boot from the hard drive.

My thinking is that Windows start-up repair did further damage to the drive, to the extent that the computer shuts down when it's detected in there.

This computer was purchased at Costco so it is in the 2nd year of the 2 year warranty they provide, but apparently year 2 is through Costco, not Acer, so there's a different repair process for that.

My primary issue is that there are a few files that I'd like to get off that hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions about using a 2.5" SATA to USB type of setup, plugging it into another computer to see if I can read the drive at all that way? Any other suggestions getting this thing going? If i can recover some of the files from the HD, I can then replace it in the 5741g and send it off for repair or replacement under warranty.

Any help/suggestions from the experts are appreciated!

Longs

 

Hi,
Only Way To solve Your Problem Is That You Connect Your sata Hard Drive
To A Desktop Pc Which Supported Sata Hard Drives By2 cable as Equipment.
now, turn off your laptop , remove the battery and remove the sata hard by opening the back door of sata hard drive.
Slave your sata hard And Transfer Your All Data To The Master Hard Drive Of The Desktop Pc .

I Will Attach A Sample Of These Cable Which You Can Pripare It In Your
Area .

please see the enclosed pictures.

good luck


gorbesia

 

Here's how it played out:

I downloaded Paragon Rescue disk, and went and purchased a SATA 2.5 to USB cable (for $30, ripoff) at Best Buy. Ripoff because you can find the same cables online for $10 to $15. Tried to boot with the Paragon Rescue Disk while the HD was still installed in the laptop, no dice. Kept cycling power, couldn't even get to the BIOS.

Removed HD from laptop, hooked up via SATA cable to my desktop running XP, couldn't read any directories. Used Ultimate Boot Disk for Windows to check the HD, showed some damaged sectors, etc. with HDTune.

I disconnected the HD from the desktop and plugged it into one of the laptop's USB Ports, with Paragon Rescue in the CD drive and another memory stick in another USB port, and was able to boot from the Paragon Rescue CD and copy some files from the HD to the USB stick via Paragon's file recovery utility.

I removed Paragon and installed the Windows System Repair disk and rebooted the laptop, tried to chkdsk /r the drive. Got a number of errors so obviously the HD is fried, I just have to decide whether there's anything else to recover from it.

I need to decide how to deal with Costco Concierge - whether i want to ship off the whole computer and be without it for days or weeks, or just spend $100 on another HD and do a clean reinstall of Windows. Thoughts on that?

So my dilemma was "sort of" solved. The laptop clearly didn't like the HD enough that it would just keep turning on and off, had zero chance of booting. It was the presence of the HD that was causing the restarts, not anything wrong with my boot CDs, CMOS, BIOS settings, etc. Using the USB to 2.5" SATA cable was the key, along with Paragon Rescue CD. I still have a corrupt, unusuable HD to contend with, though.