Long story short...my colleague punched his laptop, the laptop powered down instantly and now the hard drive can not be read. He asked me to have a look, because I'm the resident 'computer person'.

So it's an Hitachi 2.5" laptop drive, I have tried the following with no luck;

Mounted hard drive in another laptop
Mounted hard drive in an external caddy.

It can not be recognised within device manager / disk management or bios.

What you can hear is basically the head going back and forth over the platter from the parking point to the centre of the platter. It does this at a regular speed, and instead of making a clicking noise or a grinding noise it really just sounds like a faint 'Woooshing' noise as it glides back and forth at a constant and gliding speed. The head doesn't get stuck on the platter at any point.

Can anyone diagnose this?

Cheers in advance

Heads are bad for sure, and probably some media damage too.

Nothing you can do DIY I'm afraid, needs cleanroom attention from someone who knows what they're doing.

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Cheers for the reply it is much appreciated. He wont pay the prices quoted for whiteroom, so i was wondering;

Although it's in depth job, and at this stage if the hdd is dead he'll forget about it anyway so can you get a donor hdd and swap the reading head?

I would say the chances of DIY success would be extremely low (1% or less) given lack of experience, lack of cleanroom, knowledge of compatibly of parts, lack of head change tools, lack of firmware tools, lack of hardware cloning tools etc.. Etc... Etc...

Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news (truth) but that's the way it is. So,if he won't spend £300-400 to have it done properly, then I wouldn't waste money on parts and time ruining the drive for good.

DIY has it's place, and unfortunately this isn't it!

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

Thought that would be the case, i naively thought a £35 replacement drive would be the only loss in funds. The drive is dead anyway now and can't be used.

+ ruin another good working drive