Laptop hard drive failure and recovery

[Ozz316]

I have an HP laptop that according to HP, the hard drive has gone bad in. It boots and everything but is unresponsive with programs and opening files. I ran the hard drive checker in the BIOS and it came back as failed. I am going to purchase a new hard drive and was wondering what the best way was to go about copying an image over to the new hard drive? What is a fair price to pay to have someone do this for me? Thank you.

[GDH]

Hi,

It is difficult to say in this circumstance exactly what the problem is with this drive.

It is possible that it is still a "logical" error, meaning that the drive is physically OK and it is just the Operating System (Windows) that is screwed up.

Or, the problem could be more serious, such as it may be bad sectors on the drive or some other physical error that stops it from reading properly.

There are programs, such as Ghost, that will take an image of the file system or even the physical drive. If you were to get an I.T. repair company to do this for you, I would expect that they should not charge you for more than 2 hours work.

Before you consider taking it to a pc repir shop, the first thing you should try is to connect the drive to another computer as the secondary drive to see if you can read the files directly. You could also try Recover My Files (Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files) and run a "Fast Format Recover" on the physical drive to see if it will find the files.

Good luck.