Ok, so the other half managed to drop her laptop off the sofa. it posts, but then sits at a black screen (the backlight is on) but the post makes me rule out screen issues. When it sits at the black screen, I can hear the hard disk going through the same 3 clicks over and over, and the laptop heats up really quickly. I've tried the hard disk in an external SATA mount, and only the SYSTEM partition shows up which is 200MB in size. If I hook it up via a USB adapter, I get the HP Tools, System and Recovery partitions show up, but not her program files/storage partition. Thoughts on recovery of the data partition? is it to do with permissions?
ok, as an update, I can get the data partition to show up, but it never finishes loading drive info like size etc. then, i get the 'this drive must be formatted before use' dialogue. any options?
it probably isn't something you are going to be able to sort yourself, pc-image are data recovery specialists, if the Linux boot disk doesn't work (I doubt it will)
You could try the freezer trick. I'm not recommending it, you risk even worse irreversible data loss. I'd start with a Linux live disk or if you are comfortable there are some other things such as the ultimate boot cd that are full of diagnostic stuff, there is another that i found but the name escapes me. Basically any linux live boot disc will do the trick. To be honest it sounds like the hdd is damaged. You did have another backup of all your important stuff I hope? Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
Ultimate Boot CD/Ultimate Boot Disk is my recommendation for a linux live image. I use it on an almost daily basis, booted off a USB memory stick. By all means give the Ultimate Boot Disk a go, but I think it'll probably turn out that the only way you're going to get data off the drive is by sending it to a data recovery specialist. If it was reading or writing from the disk at the time of the fall i.e. if the heads were active and not parked, it'll have crashed the head into the disk surface and caused irreparable damage. I've both seen it countless times with customer laptops and external hard drives, and sadly done it once myself in exactly the same circumstances as yours.
