I assume that's the reason my primary laptop won't boot (I bring a spare on the road). :rolleyes:

Although the screen lights, I don't hear the drive engaging.

For the more hardware-savvy amongst us, I frame the following questions: is it generally possible to: a) replace laptop hard drives successfully; or b) gleam any of the contents from the failed drive with crash recovery techniques?

Will the machine boot into the BIOS? if so, check to see if the machine even sees the harddrive physically there. If not, then either a cable came loose or really, truely, sincerely dead.

You would have to check the owners manual or toshibas website for drive removal. Most are straight forward, many accessable from a panel on the bottom/side of the machine, else it is under the keyboard. To get info off, can try and put it in an external drive case, hook up to another machine via firewire or usb and try, else goto a data recovery place, big bucks

Is it under warranty?

Won't even boot up into BIOS. The screen turns on & the boot process ends there. Money's no object with recovery of material on the machine.

(It's not under warranty, unfortunately.)

no bios? sounds more like a motherboard issue

Can anything be done about that?

have u added anything recently to the machine? like extra ram, swapped out cdrom drive, have external devices hooked up to it?

might wanna google ur machine specs to see if others have the same issue

I dropped it on pavement several months ago, but hadn't had problems with it. It had been suddenly crashing on a more frequent basis recently, but nothing alarming.

The electrical systems work - for example, I can open & close the CD ROM drive.

Nothing really precipitated the crash. It had been working fine this morning, then I came back from lunch, tried to tap out the touchpad & realized it was dead.

Hmm, i'd see about pulling the drive and putting it in an external case and see if it can be read

Are laptop drives generally proprietary, or can they be replaced with 3rd party stuff?

you can buy an ide adapter that will plug your laptop HD into a desktop..kinda a cheap way to test it..they run about $15...actually..i think they are called laptop HD ide adapters :p

As Swappy said, it sounds very much like a motherboard issue. Notebook hard drives are standardised, so finding a replacement should just be a matter of dropping into a local computer store (or Newegg) and buying a 2.5" hard drive ('regular' desktop hard drives are 3.5", and won't fit in most laptops). Given that the motherboard is probably dead and that the machine is out of warranty, I'd be tempted to just scrap the lappie. Manufacturers tend to expect an arm and a leg plus your firstborn when it comes to out-of-warranty repairs on notebooks, and they'll probably cost as much as a new cheapo machine or a fair chunk of the asking price for something of high quality.

For recovering your data, my preferred course of action would be to buy an external enclosure for notebook hard drives. Newegg has a whole bunch here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=Go&DEPA=0&type=&description=2.5+enclosure&Category=0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&Go.x=0&Go.y=0). Dig up the manual for your particular model, and find out where the hard drive lives, take it out of the laptop, and install it in the enclosure. This should be an extremely straightforward process; odds are that all you'll need will be a small Phillips head screwdriver and a bit of patience. Then just connect the assembled enclosure to the USB port of your other laptop, and you should be able to recover all your stuff.

If the HDD has been damaged, there are places that specialise in recovering data, but they tend to be very pricey. I can't really recommend any stateside firms (if you want to come to the UK for the work, it'd be a different story), but a bit of googling along the lines of 'broken hard drive data recovery <thenameofthecitywhereCowPunklives>' might well prove fruitful.

I hope you'll be able to get your files back, and I apologise in advance for going into lecture mode here, but... keeping a lot of important data on one machine with no backups is pretty much asking for trouble. However the situation resolves itself, you should think seriously about implementing some kind of regular backup system for your critical data from now on. By critical data, I don't mean stuff like your operating system and programs (in the event of a disaster, you can always just reinstall these from the CDs) but your important documents, music, works in progress, or, in my case ~1 Gb of pdfs. Figure out what data you really can't afford to lose, how much of it there is, and how frequently it's updated. Then acquire some storage medium capable of storing it all (in my case, DVD-Rs and my iPod), and periodically, copy the data to your chosen medium. Label the backup with the date it was made, and keep it somewhere away from your computer.

Thanks for the advice, Jonny! :nice: I'll definitely follow up on it.

Happy holidays!

If sticking the hard drive in a external enclosure doesnt work, you can send the hard drive out to a data recovery shop.
My Tae Kwon Do school had to do this last week.
They were told it would cost between $350 and $1800.
Im not sure what the final cost was to have the data recovered. They did do a good job of recovering the data though. recovered pretty much everything, and had it delivered to them on an external USB hard drive.

I guess you can allso get another laptop and then simply put the old harddisk in the new one.