I have a Satellite L650D - 38 that recently froze then crashed. When it restarted itself got the following message.

A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

300GB HDD Model: Toshiba MK3265GSX GJ003M

Following steps I took:

1. I tried "F8", no go kept getting same error.

2. I pressed F2 went into BIOS, it recognized the HDD

3. Put a Win7 dvd in, couldn't boot to it even with F12 boot manager. I even tried many live cd's with no luck.

4. So I Took the HDD out plugged it into my desktop. I disabled autoplay in advanced. It was very slow to recognized the device, once it did it would show up as Local Disk E: with no info or size bar below in Computer window, just blank with text. When I right clicked on it, it would say "You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it"

5. Opened up Disk manager was so slow it didn't want to show my partitions at all always trying to retreive the info.

6. Opened up cmd as admin ran "chkdsk e: /f". Tried it a few times sometimes it would show it working very slowly and then nothing at all.

7. Used a live cd with acronis disk director on it. First message I got was "Failed to read from the sector 9,365,504 of the hard disk 1", I just clicked on Ignore all. It was able to see the partitions on the satellite HDD just had a small red x at each corner of the partitions indicating errors.

8. Used Win7 cd to attempt to do a startup repair, it couldn't find the installation of windows of course.

9. Ran another live cd with HDD Regenerator. It found errors from the very begginning of the HDD and took about 5 hours to only scan 1.2GB and had about 800 bad sectors repaired.

10. Ran GetDataBack to recover data, would freeze the program when it tried to find the HDD because it was so slow.

Right now I'm out of ideas, I know format will probably fix it but I have some important pics to recover. Any suggestions for recovery or temp fix?

Your time is much appreciated, thank you.

800 bads in 1.2gb?

Hmm, sounds like either severe media issues or a bad head.

Either way, running HDD regenerator was a BAD move. It could quite easily have killed your drive, if it hasn't already.

It sounds too sick to DIY I'm afraid, so if you really need your data then STOP immediately and send to a pro service.

If there only a few bad sectors, the we could have advised some DIY methods AT YOUR RISK, but in this case I fully expect any further DIY attempts to kill the drive for good.

AT THIS STAGE, pro intervention shouldn't be too expensive, but carry on and it could cost you much much more and risk losing your data for good.

Sorry it's not what you wanted to hear, but you have done all you can (and more you shouldn't have!) with the tools and knowledge you have at your disposal.

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Thanks for the advice! Like I said it only ran up to 1.2GB then I stopped it. Like I said acronis sees the partition, if I tried to copy the partition on my desktop HDD would it damage my HDD?

I will seek for pro advice, I'm in Canada any suggestions?

Thank you.

Try recovery force.

They are professional and a respected member of this forum.

Member = lcoughey

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Agreed. Contact lcoughey.

+1 for lcoughey from me too

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I am facing a similar issue with a Toshiba MK1652GSX.
Two partitions under Windows, second one accessable, but boot partition not recognized, and very hard to access.
The only way I could access and rescue the data was as follows:
1) Prepare an auxiliar blank HDD, and save TESTDISK 6.14 on it;
2) With both HDD attached to a desktop PC, boot with BART-PE CD;
3) Try to run CHKDSK /F /R /X, in the COMMAND LINE;
4) Even if unsuccessful, run TESTDISK, FILESYSTEM tool option, and LIST FILES on damaged partition;
5) Use this option of TESTDISK to COPY all the folders to the auxiliary HDD (you may select various folders with ":").
I could rescue 100% of the data.
At this moment, I am trying to format the drive with HDD Low LEvel Format Tool 4.25, as Windows failed to.
Regards,
Max.

Sorry, but have to disagree with the "run checkdisk" suggestion on a failed drive. Not a good idea.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts