Dead Hitachi Laptop Drive

[kisanth]

Hi,

I've got a Hitachi Laptop drive that has failed on me. I'm primarily looking for any advice or recommendations on repair.

Description of the problem:

Background:
Lenovo Thinkpad with Utimaco Enterprise Safeware encryption on the drive.

History:
Brought computer out of standby, the system BSOD. On reboot it loaded Utimaco but failed to load the OS, got as far as the user interface before it stated it couldn't read UI files and shut down. Attempted another reboot, Utimaco loaded again, however windows errored out that it couldn't load C:\windows\system32\config (or similar file, it fails on the same file consistently now).

The drive makes no odd noises, however the Lenovo integrated diagnostics fail the controller instantly.

I'm looking for any advice on how/where to get this drive repaired in the US, preferably within the northeast region of the US.

I would also like any independent confirmation of my suspicion that it is just the board that failed and not the drive heads or the platters.

Any advice is helpful.

Thanks in advice.
-K

[bcometa]

Hi Kisanth,
Sounds like you may have bad sectors and/or corrupt partition. If you want to try to get your data recovery affordably, I'd be happy to see what I can do for you (I do just about everything before a clean-room is necessary). If it's bad sectors, bad pcb, firmware problem, etc, I should be able to recover your data for $300. PM or visit my website (in signature) for more info.

[cpuhost]

(if the data is important you should send it to a pro).

Brought computer out of standby, the system BSOD.

Ok, so was the computer in transport during the standby? If so it sounds like the drive failed on power up after standby - the pc bluescreened because
there was no active filesystem to read/write to. 0x000000007b is typical in those situations.

Do you have the bluescreen #'s?

If the lenovo diags fail you most likely have a serious drive problem.
Is there any smart data inside of the diagnostic?
Can you run a hitachi diagnostic?

There is a slight chance the drive may not be making good contact inside the unit however the chances of that are extremely slim to none if bios detects a hard drive. (bad memory can cause a system to act erratically but again - i doubt that in this situation - you can run a memtest (http://www.memtest.org) and verify good memory.)

I'm not familiar with Utimaco, Does it allow you to boot off of a CD after it loads?

Without more information it sounds like drive failure (internal/pcb).

When you see that it couldn't load C:\windows\system32\config. Windows has started to boot but cannot read certain areas of the drive and or the registry hive is corrupted. (there is usually backups and or system restores that you could move back to get it going again, if the drive was functional)