Help! Pavilion TX1219 Hard Drive Dead :(

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately it appears my sister's TX1219 has a corrupted hard drive. A few days back the laptop was frozen and she powered it off via the power button. However when she booted it back up it gave her the issue that Windows was not shut down properly, etc. She chose to start up normally but it took forever to get to the desktop and pretty much froze at that point.

Again she powered it off via the power button but this time she received the message that there was a disk error and telling her to press CTRL ALT DEL to restart. I told her to go into safe mode on boot up and attempt to repair the hard disk via chkdsk. However the computer constantly hangs when it attempts to go into safe mode. I then checked the computer out myself and used a Vista Ultimate install disk to try to boot the computer off of that and run chkdsk to fix the corrupt sectors. However when booting the files the comp hangs and doesn't get much past 15% on loading the files. I know HP partitions the disk into the main C: drive and a recovery partition and I tried booting off of the recovery partition but that failed as well. As a method of last resort I tried to check the hard disk for any errors via the BIOS and it said the test failed.

My initial assessment of the situation is that either the hard drive has some certain sectors that are corrupted that could be repaired or perhaps that the hard drive has completely crashed.

My main goal is retrieving existing data of the hard disk and I'm wondering the best way to go about it. I have heard instances where you remove the hard drive and then put it in some casing where it can be connected to another comp via USB. If anyone has some thoughts on this course of action and how to go about actually doing it that would be much appreciated.

Finally, if the hard drive can be salvaged I'm wondering what are some of the better utilities to use in fixing the corrupt sectors or am I better off reformatting the entire drive and starting anew?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

No thoughts at all

 

You can use a SATA to USB adapter or, worst case, hook it up directly to a desktop PC's internal SATA port. Notebook and desktop SATA drives use the same connectors. Don't forget to remove the adapter HP puts on the SATA connector first (and don't lose it!).

Try searching on "data recovery" on download.com? That will give you some options. Sometimes SpinRite will resurrect a damaged HD long enough to recover your data.

 

Download and burn Ultimate BootCD, it has free tools from every significant manufacturer. Choose your own and perform hdd test. Seagate's Seatools work usually on other brand discs too and it has a nice feature to check software errors too.

If your hard drive has physical errors, just go and buy a new one. When corrupted sectors appear, it means drives internal backup sectors are already used. It could work but there's always the chance...

If only software errors are found, reformat and reinstall should work. I've ran into few cases where only software errors were present but computer crashed again few days later and nothing but HDD replacement did the trick.

In case no hardware error is found, you could try running some memtest too. Drive could be working just fine but some other hardware failure may cause software corruption.

 

Thanks for the suggestion of using UltimateBootCD, KLF. Unfortunately when I ran Seatools in the long test mode, it said there was a read scan error after coming up with at least 99 errors in less than 3-4 mins of testing and only 0% complete.

There now appears to be a clicking noise from the hard drive when I try to boot up normally and it gives me the same disk read error and telling me to press CTRL ALT DEL to restart. When I again try to use the recovery partition it now displays the message "No Operating System Found..." I do have an old HP ze4560us from nearly 5-6 years ago and was wondering if I removed the TX1219's hard drive if I could swap it with the one I have in my old HP?

P.S. I also tried some of the other utilities on UltimateBootCD for HDD diagnostics and none of them could even detect I had a hard drive... :/ Not terribly encouraging if I do say so myself.

 

Thanks for the heads up brian! Any ideas as to what manufacturers make good SATA to USB cables/enclosures and where I can find one relatively cheap? I went to Best Buy and saw one made my Rocketfish going for $60, a bit steep I thought but perhaps that is the going rate.

 

Pick a well reviewed one on newegg.com.

 

Ah the clicking noise. In my experience that usually marks the sign of death in a HDD.

 

There isn't much you can do with the old drive aside from hope you had a backup of the data.

 

Hey thanks everyone for all your advice and ideas

My last question is simply this if I'm going to replace the drive do I have to purchase a new HDD from HP directly? The tech support guy at Seagate said that sometimes OEM drives occasionally employ proprietary firmware/connections which would make it difficult for me to use an out of the box retail Seagate or any other HD manufacturer's laptop HD. Can I just buy directly from Seagate and save dough or do I have to purchase through HP?

My TX1219 came with a Seagate Momemtus 5400.3

 

Basically any drive (serial-ata of course) you can get your hands on, will work.

Original HDD may have adapter installed, you just need to move it to the new drive.