Laptop won't start or reformat is my HDD wrecked?

Hi guys,

A few days ago i turned on my Asus fj3r and it came up with that black screen saying windows vista hasn't shut down properly and when i chose either start normally or in safe mode, windows won't load. Instead it comes up with asus recovery tool. I've tried the top option of letting the tool automatically fix any disk problems and it runs through but doesnt have any effect. This has happened a few times before and i've been forced to chose the bottom option of the recovery tool and reformat the laptop (i think its like using the boot disk, the same option comes up when you press f9 at start-up).

Anyway i tried to reformat and it actually gets stuck at 10 or 12% and the computer starts making a clicking noise =S now when i power up i dont even get the recovery tool menu it automatically goes to the reformat tool and always gets stuck and i get a scary white screen with a large ERROR sign with "ERROR: S [err = 2]" at the top. The noise isn't coming from the cd drive like most noises do, i'm not sure what else would be making the noise perhaps the hard drive is completely wrecked.. Does anyone have any other suggestions before i have to take it to a repair shop? (it's out of warranty so that's a last resort)

Thanks heaps guys.

 

a clicking harddrive is always bad news. if it is clicking, your heads are either knocking or the bearings in the drive are bad


If it were me, I'd pull the drive IMMEDIATELY. After tha, I would likely drop it in a ziplock freezer back for 20 minutes (old pc tech trick for seizing bearings) and then insert it as a slave in another machine to see if anything can be recovered using a data recovery tool like testdisk.

But, yeah, you're drive is in trouble. Now the only thing you can do is try to recover data.

 

If you don't care about the data, just buy a new harddrive (they're not that expensive), recover your Windows installation from the optical recovery disk(s), and take it from there.