Hi everyone,
Today, I was watching a youtube video on my laptop, minding my own business, and I leaned on my laptop, with my chin in my palm, and elbow on my laptop, meaning that quite a bit of pressure was being exerted on my laptop. I happened to lean just where the hard drive was, and I immediately heard a funny noise, and I think it then stopped (I'm afraid I can't exactly remember what happened at the exact moment). It then started making a very bad-sounding noise, over and over and over again, which I've uploaded a short recording of at
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ymn3k65fi ... ce_007.m4a, because I couldn't seem to attach it here for some reason (the loud click at the start of the recording is me turning on the power supply that I was using to power the hard drive to take the recording, and you can also hear the power supply fan in the background, obviously just ignore that, also you may need to turn the volume up
). At the moment it happened, I tried clicking start but the start menu wouldn't load, and then windows blue-screened, and my laptop attempted to restart, but there was no boot media, and the hard drive was still making this noise. I tried inserting the windows installation disk, but it couldn't detect the hard drive. So I took the laptop apart, took the hard drive out and tried powering it with a separate power supply from a different computer (which is how I did the recording), and obviously the exact same thing happened, except it stopped entirely after making the noise a few times, so it's clear that the hard drive isn't working at all.
I have a backup of all of my important stuff thankfully, but there are a few less important things that aren't on the backup, so it would be nice to have as much data as possible recovered. I'm just wondering, judging by the sound and that it was caused by excessive pressure, does it sound like something that could be fixed? I don't exactly trust myself with repairing this hard drive and recovering data off it, so I'd probably get someone who knows what they're doing to do it, but I'm wondering if it sounds possible, or if I should just forget it, discard it and buy a new hard drive? Help would be appreciated