3 dull clicks, the Phoenix screen, operating system not found...WTH?

Lappie working just fine when I left her last night.... tonight I come in and nothing.... When I reboot I hear 3 dull clicks, then a series of noises that sound like a clock is ticking very slowly, then the Phoenix techologies screen comes up and stays for several minutes... then the ominous message...."operating system not found" appears... nothing else happens after that.

Any suggestions as to next steps would be greatly appreciated.

 

:O

Might be a hdd failure...

 

Go into your BIOS and see if it still sees your HDD. It does sound like the drive is dead.

 

Almost certainly hard drive failure - the clicks are almost certainly the hdd trying, and failing, to work properly.

It's a long shot, but check first to see if the hdd connector is properly seated (I doubt this is the problem, but you never know).

Ultimately, you're going to have to swap the old hdd out for a new one. If you're lucky, the hdd may not have totally failed yet for all time, so you might be able to stick it into an external enclosure and then see if you can get it to catch and run once more (the original hdd in my vaio failed that way, being basically cheap, I went for two months before I swapped it out where I would sometimes have to restart the computer 10 or 15 times in succession before I caught the drive just right and it spun up - in retrospect, a very dumb thing to do if you have any valuable unbacked-up data on the disk). I have actually been able to rescue stuff off of two failing hdds this way, although it's always a crap-shoot.

 

BAM!

Hard drive failure.

 

you can try putting it in an external HD enclosure

 

Got into the bios via f2. It is not seeing the hard drive. My lappie is a Sony SZ120p... I assume at this point my next step is to pull the hd out and try to access the data on it from another computer? Or is there another step?

 

that is your step, but don't get to hopeful. The symptoms described are definitely hardware and recovering the data often requires a little luck. A harddisk enclosure or mounting as a slave or to a secondary controller may get the drive up long enough to remove data, but the three click and nothing is a bad sign

You can try an old pc tech trick of putting the drive in a sealed freezer bag (squeeze all air out), for about 15 minutes, and then mounting it in new computer.

This will work for a stuck spindle sometimes and get the drive up and running for a short time. It is equally likely you have a failing circuit board on the drive, though, which means the freezer trick will not work.

If no go, at this point, you can try a couple things:
swap the drive circuit board from an identical harddrive model with same firmware (often tough to find)

Send it to a drive recovery service, that will physically disassemble the drive in a clean room environment and place the platters in a known good drive, and recover data for you

 

Good suggestions... by any chance can you recommend and hard drive recovery firms?

 

Not off hand, but be prepared to pay a few hundred bucks per gig!

 

If it just started making the ugly noises and not booting, and particularly if you've had one or two successful boots since the first time it began getting noisy, you may still have a fair chance of getting your data off the drive if you put it into an external USB enclosure and try to get it to spin up again.

The first order of business, however, is replacing it and reinstalling your OS so that you have a computer to work with in the first place. Of course, if you have another computer to use, you might try putting both the old drive and the new drive into external enclosures first, and then seeing if you can use the other computer and a utility like Acronis True Image (or any other good cloning software) to clone the old drive over to the new (provided you don't have too many surface defects on the old hdd already).

Putting the old hdd into a freezer for a couple of minutes isn't a bad idea either, particularly if the drive's failed because something's binding up - the cold will cause the components to shrink slightly, thereby reducing the friction between any binding parts - make sure that you squeeze all the air out of the plastic bag first, however, or else you'll get moisture condensing on the insides of the drive, and possibly forming ice crystals, which will almost certainly kill the drive permanently.

There's no guarantee that this will actually work for you - a lot of it will depend on just how bad the failure is right now - but it's worth giving a try, because it's going to be pretty expensive if you have to take it to a data-recovery shop. For example, this company, Eco Data Recovery, charges a flat rate of $795 for recovering data off a 40GB 3.5" desktop drive.

Unfortunately, most of the places that advertise data recovery online seem to have become rather coy about advertising their fees, but it's probably not unreasonable to assume that you'll have to pay at least $200 or so if you have to send the drive out to a recovery shop.