Help! My X41 HDD just died! Help, info <inside>

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spelinda · #1 Post by **spelinda** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 11:27 am

People, I'm in the greatest despair. Today in university I came and open up lid of my X41 (2528-6NU) and tried to wake up from hybenate. It loaded and show up desktop - I tried to start .avi and it hanged - after I received a blue screen in winxp and it restart with NO Operating System found. I don't know what to do... Maybe it windows partition but I tried to start recover partition and no result - same message. But people, I'm in deep trouble - to much info to loose. Please help and let me know where could I buy Hitachi 60Gb hdd...

Adam · #2 Post by **Adam** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:06 pm

My suggestion is to download Drive Fitness Test from the Hitatchi site: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm and run it on your drive.

If you don't have a dock with a CD-ROM drive to boot up this program in, I suggest booting it with a USB flash drive or if its possible, an SD card. I've never looked into booting from an SD card before so I don't know if its possible.

Hopefully other people have some better suggestions.

spelinda · #3 Post by **spelinda** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:13 pm

man, thanks for advice but I think I could not run anything on this system - it simply DOESNOT boot at all! I'm really not in good mood about this, I'll try to use IDE->USB connector to connect this faulty HDD to my workstation so maybe it will be recognized by system and I could backup my data (oh man, I beg for this!!!) anyway more ideas is more than happy I will be to see... In my situation any suggestion may help... really people...

#4 Post by **jdhurst** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:46 pm

You have a couple of options (neither trivial):

1. Purchase, beg or borrow a hard disk caddy and find someone else with a ThinkPad. Plug in the drive caddy with your hard disk and see if you can read it from the host ThinkPad.
2. Download and create Bart's PE on a Windows XP machine with a CD writer. Find a buddy with a ThinkPad with a CD. Put your drive in their machine (no caddy required) and boot with Bart's PE CD and see if you can see the drive and the data on it.

With either of these two approaches, you can at least see if data is recoverable. ... JD Hurst

Adam · #5 Post by **Adam** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 9:18 pm

spelinda wrote:man, thanks for advice but I think I could not run anything on this system - it simply DOESNOT boot at all! I'm really not in good mood about this, I'll try to use IDE->USB connector to connect this faulty HDD to my workstation so maybe it will be recognized by system and I could backup my data (oh man, I beg for this!!!) anyway more ideas is more than happy I will be to see... In my situation any suggestion may help... really people...

The computer doesn't even turn on??? You can't even get into the bios options??? If this is the case and you can't boot off anything... then I don't see how putting a new hard drive will help.

spelinda · #6 Post by **spelinda** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 4:39 am

no Adam, I can still boot up computer and enter Bios... but I cannot get to boot anything from HDD including Restore and Recovery!

Yes I have a caddy and have another thinkpad... I will try do anything to recover data - I'm ready to go to prof. company so they will recover it professionally. I think data is recoverable.. cuz eveRything was fine no bads - just this silly cranking sound almost everyone have them here with they X41T-X40... I doubt the data was killed... it's just something mechanical... with drive head... I hope I will getaway from this situation with small blood.... thanks everybody in for answers.. be sure to check this thread with couple of days - I'll keep you posted!

Adam · #7 Post by **Adam** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 7:23 am

spelinda wrote:no Adam, I can still boot up computer and enter Bios... but I cannot get to boot anything from HDD including Restore and Recovery!

Yes I have a caddy and have another thinkpad... I will try do anything to recover data - I'm ready to go to prof. company so they will recover it professionally. I think data is recoverable.. cuz eveRything was fine no bads - just this silly cranking sound almost everyone have them here with they X41T-X40... I doubt the data was killed... it's just something mechanical... with drive head... I hope I will getaway from this situation with small blood.... thanks everybody in for answers.. be sure to check this thread with couple of days - I'll keep you posted!

In that case, you can follow my first suggestion. You can boot up a computer through CD-ROM/USB drive/floppy/etc without even having a hard drive in the computer. Boot up the hitachi program I was talking about with one of the possible boot options, and let it scan your drive.

Deckard · #8 Post by **Deckard** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 9:58 am

Spelinda,

you said that you can boot to BIOS, but didn't tell us if you can detect the HDD in the BIOS.

egibbs · #9 Post by **egibbs** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 12:33 pm

Can you get to the IBM Diagnostics from BIOS? If so, then you can run the disk check.

It is most likely that one or more of the crirical boot files was damaged during the crash, but that the rest of the drive is essentially fine. If you can get chkdsk /f to run it will probably fix the problem.

Ed Gibbs

reikochii · #10 Post by **reikochii** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:22 am

Sorry for bumping this.
But it's related to the issue I had: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=17059
In fact, almost the same.

The last thing I did was playing .avi movie too, and it hanged after I received blue screen of "dumping memory" in winxp. After restart, I got an error message of some dll not found, and windows can't run. And after that, no operating system was found. (of course, the clicking sound occured at all times)
In both our cases, BIOS no longer detects the hdd.
I have tried hdd regenerator and Hitachi Drive Fitness Test. They all showed up HDD not found .... With win boot disk, setup runs but no hdd found.

I doubt your IDE->USB connector works..?
Please let me know how you managed to get your data back.

spelinda · #11 Post by **spelinda** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 2:46 am

hello everyone, sorry for not checking this post frequently, but here is an update...

Yes, it died.... simply and lightly fast... Thanks good I recovered my data and my session will pass me normally but really, I've lost my trust in IBM for putting those hdd to their "ultra-portable" notebooks. I always wanted to have one of those badboys... I got T40 but was looking at X30, got T41 but X31 was my desire... after T42 and dreams about X40 I once again was standing between two evils - T43 and X41... ya know my choice... and really - I fell I made a great mistake...

HDD completely died... Frankly speaking those "klick"ing could not end by something else. Ya know, I fully realised how lame I'am... I'm working with PCs for many years (approx. 10), sometimes I look like a phreak then painting my PC case getting handmade modds, phase-change cooling in it and etc... But worst thing I know my HDD gonna die but DID completely NOTHING to back up data... Oh hell, at last I got 2Gb SD and I could backup something... but no!

After it happen to me I realized how global this problem is.. ya know - when you a looking at eBay and find links like this one ya gonna cry, cuz really- those [censored] hdds gonna die all, sooner or later...

So ya can ask me, why did you post a lot of BS like these here on forum about ibmXseries... And I'm gonna tell you - it's just my intention to show a great despair in biggest computer error - us people...sometimes you need to backups, especially when your data cost money... a lot of them... I'm not jsut a student, I'm ready to run my own business and many files on this matter was lost...

I was standing between choice... bring down laptop to IBM support center and get my HDD exchanged for free... or take this HDD to a real proffesionals, pay alot of money for they clear and brilliant work and start looking for another HDD to fit in my X41...

They recovered everything... just read everything directly from HDD magnetic disks with breaking up vacuumzone in HDD. And ya know one of service workers said to me athis place? He just gave me an advice - HDD is not a good place for sensitive data... If you don't want to pay for recovery more than new HDD costs - back up... write DVDs, fill up ur flash cards and etc... Cuz ya don't know when problem gonna show up...

So now I'm looking for replacement for fried HDD...
If ya got questions (any) fire up them here... I will try to show up at Thuesday and answer them AFAIK...

And place where I got my hdd recovered- don't ask I will not advert. it... I found a few places for such kind of operation.. in a few of them I could save up to 50$ but I was not sure about the result, so I pick up the oldest one working with a good state of workers, best hardware, dust free environment and etc... Thanks god, I got everything recovered...

So bottom line of my story - If you want to save urself a lot of headaches be sure to back up your data frequently...

reikochii · #12 Post by **reikochii** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 1:16 pm

I'm sorry to hear the troubles you had to go through..
I guess I'll have to take it to data recovery service too.

spelinda: Would you mind giving me the information of the place you got your data recovered? Like location, total cost, and time it took?
Please, if you don't mind, I left my email address in your pm box. Or you could pm me back if you prefer.

I have to send my original hdd back to ibm soon.. because the hd replacement already arrived.
But I _must_ get my data back first..
I thought I should bring it to the ibm service center for data recovery, since it's safer to deal with?
Any suggestions? I'm located in Canada, Toronto area..

I know how you feel.
I felt the same way too. Very disappointed with my x40.
More upset that I didn't back up due to my ignorant belief that since it's ibm, it's new, it should be fine.

Painful lesson learned. Back up all the time.

tazman · #13 Post by **tazman** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 1:07 pm

spelinda:

I second the request: please post where you got the data recovery done and how much it cost. A few weeks ago the drive in my new X40 died, when I called around to data recovery services the quotes for *physical* data recovery were crazy - like in the range of $1,000 - $2,000 or more.

Help! My X41 HDD just died! Help, info <inside>

Help! My X41 HDD just died! Help, info <inside>

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