Noooo, the HDD in my HP Probook 4520s is DEAD

[wolfgang5150]

Originally Posted by Sarcosis

Damn HDD prices still kinda sucky though. (

Tell me about it. I've been holding off buying a new drive for a while. I'd been checking prices every so often to see if they're coming down. Then yesterday I read a few articles wherein they predicted hard drive prices will remain inflated by a steady 30% until 2014

Needless to say I can't wait that long so I broke down and bought a Seagate 1.5 TB from Newegg, on sale, for $99. It's the same drive I bought a little over a year ago for $60 It does come with a free external enclosure, though... So I feel a little bit better about it, I guess

[jbravo17]

Originally Posted by DarkGuyver

So it looks like that I will have to replace the internal HDD in my HP Probook 4520s. Bad thing is that I will have lost all my work for the last possiblly 6 months!

If the drive still actually mounts (ie, you can see files on it ... but it clicks and has trouble reading them) then just set it aside. Don't do anything until you get your OS loaded on your new drive, or have a chance to connect the drive (via USB cable, external enclosure, what have you) to a running machine with some available disk space. More than likely, you have a drive with a few bad spots, and the data from all of the unaffected sectors of the drive can be recovered, if you only try hard enough to read them.

That's basically the premise of professional hard drive recovery, which is very expensive, but there is a free tool (TestDisk) that can work wonders in many cases. I've recovered many a file from many a clicking drive using a combination of TestDisk and good old Windows CHKDSK/F.

You can download and learn about TestDisk from:

http://cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Note that TestDisk is actually designed to fix software types of errors (of which you seem fairly certain you're not suffering from, and from your descriptions I would tend to agree with you). However, it also uses a brute force approach to read bad sectors that is fairly effective. By alternating runs of TestDisk with CHKDSK/F (and the latter can be VERY time consuming on a clicking drive) for nearly 3 days on a 120GB drive (from an older HP ProBook, actually) I recently got over 90% of the files back. The young lady I did it for was very happy, and that certainly wasn't the first time that I achieved a result like that.

There are other tools out there that do this more elegantly ... and possibly even better. But most of them are quite expensive, designed for commercial repair shops ... and priced like it. I actually own older versions of a couple, and I routinely charged for their use "back in the day". But my ancient software is useless on newer, large NTFS partitions and I'm no longer actively in the data recovery business to cough up the cash to get anything current.

Testdisk is a very unforgiving text-based application. But it is also a free download, and if after reading up on it you have questions about it's use, just PM me and I'll be happy to help. No promises, of course, but it's worth the shot unless you're willing to pony up the cash to send it to a data recovery house. (In which case, the less you do to the drive yourself, the better off you'll be!)

Whatever you decide, good luck to you. I've lost hard disk data before, it's never expected, or fun.

--JB

[FoxTint]

When you do buy a external hard drive, don't be motivated by price. Western Digital and Seagate are the trusted brands, and the products will last long, providing you don't drop it on the floor more than once.

You want an external HDD to last a few years, and after 5 or so you should think about replacing as it could die at any time. Research the prices on Western Digital MyBook [Essential] in your area, those are very good and the ones I have bought have lasted a long while.

All the suggestions in your thread are very helpful, and I would take their advice to heart

[DarkGuyver]

I've just gotten a reply back from HP, now I'm on the hunt for a new HDD to replace my faulty one. Just wondering is there any performance difference between a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm drive?

Originally Posted by FoxTint

When you do buy a external hard drive, don't be motivated by price. Western Digital and Seagate are the trusted brands, and the products will last long, providing you don't drop it on the floor more than once.

You want an external HDD to last a few years, and after 5 or so you should think about replacing as it could die at any time. Research the prices on Western Digital MyBook [Essential] in your area, those are very good and the ones I have bought have lasted a long while.

I've actually got a bunch of external drives for back ups. I have 3x 200GB IDE external HDD, which I have built for backing up data, and I have a older 80GB IDE drive from a old desktop, which I have yet to convert to a back drive. I also have a 500GB TivX media player.

[yamchan07bb]

YMMV. RPM paired with with 8Mb or 32Mb of cache could make a difference depending on the tasks you execute, in the long run, fragmentation comes into play too (so a high speed drive could offset it by having faster seeking times), but...

Higher RPM also means more heat, a possible slightly decrease in battery life, more noise and a slightly higher price tag. If you are in doubt because of reliability, well don't be, you will never be able to acquire a fail-proof drive *cue creep music*

[DoctorNo]

Originally Posted by DarkGuyver

I've just gotten a reply back from HP, now I'm on the hunt for a new HDD to replace my faulty one. Just wondering is there any performance difference between a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm drive?

There is for your system drive. But for external drives used for storage it doesn't matter much. Depending on how you have them connected, the bottleneck will be slower than the drive. Both are fast enough for anything you might do. Backups might take a bit less time with a faster drive, but I usually let those run while I'm doing something else anyway.

[DarkGuyver]

Are the WD Scorpio Blue 2.5 inch drives any good? I'm having a problem find the WB Scorpio Black 2.5 inch drives, since the flooding in Thailand. I did consider getting a hybrid drive, but I'm not sure if they will function properly on my HP Probook 4520s.

[yamchan07bb]

They are as good as they can possibly be. What matters is what you have in mind when using them. Now, let's just hope they are not from a bad batch or anything like that

Black series:
Better performance
Less storage space per $$$

Blue series:
Lower performance
More storage space per $$$

[Devout Pornist]

I have a HP netbook as a secondary and it's hard drive died in 4 months, a brand new laptop My own fault when I didn't ask who the HDD maker is, it was Fuijitsu. HP is a pretty cheap company and their laptop build ups are even worse.

If a hard drive dies, you can try to recover it's data with certain software/hardware, but it costs a lot of money. As a new HDD I would recommend Western Digital, one of the best out there, especially in the external department.

[DarkGuyver]

Originally Posted by ZiiLak

I have a HP netbook as a secondary and it's hard drive died in 4 months, a brand new laptop My own fault when I didn't ask who the HDD maker is, it was Fuijitsu. HP is a pretty cheap company and their laptop build ups are even worse.

If a hard drive dies, you can try to recover it's data with certain software/hardware, but it costs a lot of money. As a new HDD I would recommend Western Digital, one of the best out there, especially in the external department.

The problem with most retailer is that they don't know what make of the components are in the products they sell most of the time, and most computer manufacturers themselves don't even know whats in their products most of time, because they sometime use a combination of brands to speed up production. So it's really the pick of the draw, whether or not you get a computer made with good quality parts. But I've been lucky so far all of my hard drives have been Maxtor. With the expection of the HDD in my HP Probook 4520s, I cann't remember what brand of HDD is in that.