Broken Hard drive

christ on a bike!

Hey, what's the craic?

Think I bust my the harddrive on my laptop, the internet was going too slow for my liking so gave a hard rap with the knuckles just below the key board, turned out to be directly above the lap top.
Anyway, it started coughing a bit, error saying that the disk can't be read so I presume it is broken.

I would greatly appreciate any advice I could get on two points and I'll owe ye a favour

(i) is it worth trying to get the disk fixed, ie bring it in to a shop. There are some things like music and CV's I'd like to retrieve

(ii) I found the model disk, mk3265gsx online for about €90, seems like a fair enough price to me?
Question is, if I were to buy it would I be able to pop it right in? I'm pretty tech tarded but is windows stored on your hard drive or in RAM?

Any offerings are greatly appreciated, insults and jokes also welcomed

seanogwalsh

It's not worth trying to get fixed. It's impossible actually. Yeah if you buy it you slot the old one out, it'll be held on with one or two screws. You put the new one in it's place and screw it back down. You will have to reinstall windows because the OS is stored on the HDD and not in RAM

pippam

If you're tech tarded I would not advise fixing it yourself. Bring it to a shop. They will replace the hard drive and reinstall the windows. They can probably recover your data too but it won't be cheap. Also you will have to pay for the new Windows if you don't have a valid windows serial key attached to your laptop somewhere and that will set you back around 100 quid or more.

christ on a bike!

Well I'm tech tarded in the context of this forum but not all that bad generally. I've already had the hard drive out to see what I could see, main thing I was wondering was if it was just a matter of popping it back in.
Got the laptop just over a year ago, just had to power it on and windows was installed alreayd, dont thik I have a means to re-install
I'll have to check, thanks for your help folks, much appreciated


EDIT : Sorry but just need to ask another lil question on this, if my hard drive is screwed and I pop in another, then without windows being pre-installed on it I would have no option but to buy widows on disk?

FSL

If you still have the sticker on the laptop with the windows version and activation key still legible on it then all you need is a cd for the same version. Preferably one from the same manufacturer as your laptop.

You will probably find a friend or colleague with one or if the laptop just came with a restore partition on it someone who actually created the restore disK.

I know it sounds like shutting the stable door but if you don't get a disk with the machine you should follow the instructions that came with the laptop and create one.

Even if you never use it it should be worth a few drinks from a friend or colleague who like you now needs one.

Green Mile

I have a floppy

Fluffy88

Like has been said already, just buy a new HDD and pop it in and all will be good.

As for installing Windows, you don't need to go buying anything. When you bought your laptop it came with an OEM licence for Windows, which means the licence is tied to your motherboard and once you don't change your motherboard you can just install the same version of Windows and it will pick up the licence key automatically during the install.
Now to get a copy of Windows, isn't that what the internet was made for
http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/604187-legal-download-digitalriver-windows-7-sp1-13-languages.html
And it is completely legal since you already have a licence you are just getting a copy of the installation media.

And you might be able to recover some of your files yourself.
There is lots of thread about how to do it and what programs you need here on boards, just do a search for them.
If you have an external HDD, open it up, place your broken HDD into the caddy.
Start up your newly installed Windows and install a recover program(recuva being one)
Connect the old HDD now in an external caddy to the laptop and see what you can get from it.
I would recommend trying a few different program if some of them don't work, I had to do this for a friend a few months back and I went through a few different tools before I found one that worked.