Toshiba laptop drive died

[bartbart]

Can someone please advise me:

Yesterday evening I was working on my laptop and suddenly Windows 7 gave me a BSOD, kernel error. This happened before so I was not too worried. When I tried to reboot, my laptop reported there was no harddrive present. I booted to the BIOS and it found no harddrive. I placed the drive in too other laptops, same problem..

The disk is actually spinning. I hear no strange noises coming from it. If i remove power from the laptop, there is a click and it stops spinning. The BIOS actually does not see the drive.

The thing is, there are some photo's on the drive I would like to save and my last backup is a month ago (stupid I know). I already ordered the same drive via Ebay. I could find only one model matching so i wanted to be sure.

Now I read a lot of things: put the whole drive in the freezer/Use a donor PCB/Resolder the rom chip from the original to the donor/transfer the platter. etc etc.
What would be my best first step?

Model:
Toshiba MK5065GSXN

[labtech]

Definitely not freeze it.

Possibilities are few, but probably bad sectors or mechanical. For best results, see a specialized data recovery company.

[bartbart]

Can bad sectors or mechanical damage cause a drive to be completely undetected?

[labtech]

Yes, those can do that.

[positivebit]

Toshiba MK5065GSXN

i confirm bad sectors can make a drive "invisible". for instance now i am recovery the same drive, and after reading slowly 200.000.000 Lbas heads decide to die.
clean bench is waiting now as last solution.

by the way PC3000 has got higher percentual in killing head's hard drives than DataCompass

[bartbart]

When looking at the description (hd is spinning, no strange sounds, but the disk is not seen by the bios), do i have any chance by swapping the pcb and soldering the original rom?

Disclaimer; I know the risk. By coming to this website I decided to try it myself instead of using a professional service. I draw the line at pcb swap. I work at a company which has a department with professional equipment for fixing communication equipment at pcb level (and guys who are qualified to use the tools). We also have a lower class clean room, but I do not want to open the disk itself. So head replacement / platter transfer is out of the question for me.

[bartbart]

Don't know what just happened. I wanted to see if mhdd did recognize my drive. So i burned the cd, booted the pc and was too late selecting the cd as boot. So the pc halted, second time same thing but now windows booted! My hd came to live. I am now backupping all data as a mad men. The baby photo's are already saved so my wife is happy.

Now first install a new drive with a decent backup program.

Thanks for your help.

I do think this forum should be invitiation only, while reading today I found this forum is intended for professionals and not for DIY. DIY is even frowned upon. The advice to visit a pro is maybe the best, but also the same as google tells you when you look for a solution. I was looking for a DIY solution with all the risks attached to it and extatic when I found this forum.

Maybe you can setup a stickie with thing you can try as a DIY guy, with the risks attached to it and from which point you should go for a pro? maybe even ask a fee for advise. I would happily pay 30eu for an advise, even if eventually it was to find a pro when it can't be solved DIY. The stress of loosing data makes opening your wallet a lot easier. The alternative is paying 1000's of euros to a company who you have to trust on their blue eyes.

Thanks again for your help and all resources on this site. I did learn alot about the internal working of harddisks thanks to this experience.

[Vulcan]

Maybe you can setup a stickie with thing you can try as a DIY guy, with the risks attached to it and from which point you should go for a pro?

Something like this, you mean?

diy-what-the-big-deal-t12671.html

Personally I don't agree with all your prevous comments. Due to the wide range of different people's abilities and expectations when they visit the board, it would be very difficult (impossible? impractical?) to provide a list of what is reasonable for DIY - some techniques are possible for person X and absolutely not for person Y. Of course, that's just my view after being here for a few years, based on what I've seen. Other people will have different views.

Congratulations on getting your drive to initialise again (and therefore be recognised) - I recommend you do not power-off until you've recovered all the data you need, as you can't be sure it'll be recognised again after a power-cycle. Good luck!

[bartbart]

Vulcan;
I can see your point.

The laptop is still copying. The laptop and a 3 meter range around it is now a forbidden area for anone until everything is copied. The same later on for the external drive until that has a backup to my nas.

Out of interest, what do you think was/is the problem with the drive. I am not interested in trying to fix it, i do not trust i anymore. Just curious what caused this ordeal.

[labtech]

One can't possibly provide an accurate answer and be applicable without accurate tests, especially remotely. There are many possibilities.

Windows 7 can do some weird things on boot up.

Although I am not sure why it did not happen on a subsequent boot up cycle, I think checkdisk solved your problem. Once you complete backing up your data, restart the machine and see if it continues to boot up correctly. If it does not boot up, then further testing is needed. You have to figure out what the culprit really is by starting with drive and mhdd. Check SMART as a starting point.

[Vulcan]

@labtech:

One can't possibly provide an accurate answer and be applicable without accurate tests, especially remotely.

Agreed.

I think checkdisk solved your problem.

But remember that the OP said earlier:

When I tried to reboot, my laptop reported there was no harddrive present. I booted to the BIOS and it found no harddrive. I placed the drive in too other laptops, same problem.

chkdsk (and similar) can only affect the filesystem(s), which is not related to the ability of the BIOS to recognise the drive itself. So I don't see the connection between anything chkdsk could fix, and the symptom reported by the OP above. What am I not understanding in your comment, that would explain how chkdsk could do this?

[labtech]

@labtech:

One can't possibly provide an accurate answer and be applicable without accurate tests, especially remotely.

Agreed.

I think checkdisk solved your problem.

But remember that the OP said earlier:

When I tried to reboot, my laptop reported there was no harddrive present. I booted to the BIOS and it found no harddrive. I placed the drive in too other laptops, same problem.

chkdsk (and similar) can only affect the filesystem(s), which is not related to the ability of the BIOS to recognise the drive itself.

@Vulcan: This is true and I am in total agreement.

So I don't see the connection between anything chkdsk could fix, and the symptom reported by the OP above. What am I not understanding in your comment, that would explain how chkdsk could do this?

Not to undermine the OP in any way, but it seemed to me that the user may have been confused by the "I booted to the BIOS and it found no harddrive" situation.

Checkdisk function bringing the machine or drive (because we still do not know which one is truly the issue) back to life was more or less a theory based on the fact that the drive and the machine booted and worked once more all of a sudden.

The only other alternative I can think of here that could have been the culprit without accurate testing is maybe an issue with the HDA contacts on the PCB as in oxidation. I personally have never come across this HDA contacts issue in Toshiba laptops.

With that in my mind, I thought that the only viable fixer here would have been checkdisk. The machine itself cannot fix itself nor can the HDD. So, then there has to be something that it is run automatically, like a facilitator so to speak. Since my original thought of bad sectors was the issue, which in itself was based on the fact of a spinning non-clicking drive, I assumed that one or more of the key file system areas for booting or other role, may have been affected by those bad sectors. Once checkdisk kicked in, it address the issue and made the drive once again accessible.

... I placed the drive in too other laptops, same problem.

This statements indicates that there is an issue with HDD. But what that makes sense?

1. If it was a mechanical issue with the heads, then the HDD would definitely not come back to life again. Once a head is gone, it is gone for good.

2. If it as a mechanical issue with the spindle, which is fairly common in Toshiba drives, then this could have been the issue. However, for the HDD to have worked for a while without noise and still going it is unlikely.

3. If it was a problem with the HDA contacts or any other PCB component's solder points, then this could make a HDD operation intermittent. As stated before, I did not come across this.

4. If it was a bad sector or file system related issue, and given only what the user did, then checkdisk would have been the only changing factor in my interpretation of the situation.

Does anybody agree with this theory or have other that would explain what the OP's issue may have been based on the info provided at the time of my post?

After backing up his data and he is ok with the test, I would like the user to reboot his laptop 10 times or so and post here if the machine boots every time, sometimes does and sometimes does not, or what?

Then check SMART to see if there are entries for reallocated and pending.

@bartpart - If you decide to run these tests, then thanks in anticipation.

[Vulcan]

@labtech,

Thanks for clarifying your thoughts about this.

I agree that something changed, to cause the drive to now be usable, when it wasn't usable before. My personal view is that this may have been an intermittent drive fault (similar to number (2) or (3) on your list), because I was believing the OP's original comment about the drive not being reported in the BIOS, which chkdsk cannot fix (as we agreed). If that original information was not accurate, then of course, other options become possible.

As always, remote diagnosis is an imperfect art, and also an intermittent fault may temporarily disappear and surprise us!

I like your suggestion of checking the SMART data and repeating some power-cycles, to see if there is any evidence there to suggest what type of problem the drive may have (although SMART data is not guaranteed to show evidence of all drive problems). It's definitely worth checking this, if bartbart is willing to do so, after his data has been copied off the disk.

Thanks again for your comments.

[labtech]

@Vulcan No problem.

Nowadays, it is becoming more and more difficult to get an accurate picture of what someone is doing on their end. Gotta filter out what may or not make sense in a description.

Everyday I read problem descriptions by customers that make no sense with relation to the drives' doing.

Good thing we have a happy end here.

Happy Holidays.

[bartbart]

Hi Labtech, Vulcan,

I tried rebooting about 5 times. Once it was very slow, once it halted and Windows executed startup repair. But until now it still works. I will try it tonight for a few more times. I have run HDDscan (the version from this site, it shows the following warnings:

Num Attribute Name Value Worst Raw(hex) Threshold

005 Reallocation Sector Count 100 100 00000000-02C1 050
191 G-sense error rate 100 100 00000000-001A 000
196 Reallocation Event Count 100 100 00000000-0075 000

A newer version from the hddscan itself does not show the G-sense error. All other values are green.

When the drive was not working, I also tried it in another laptop, this one also did not detect a harddrive. I ran a HD utility from Ultimate Bootcd, this simply halted during detection of harddrives.

[Vulcan]

@bartbart,

Many thanks for that info - IMHO this clearly shows the drive has an intermittent fault, as shown by its varying behaviour during boot, and by that SMART data. It's sick

I'm glad you managed to recover your data - remember to do backups in the future