T400 won't boot (no error msg)

[Czechnology]

I haven't expected that I'll have to pull out my old T43 so soon again


Yesterday afternoon I've sent the Thinkpad T400 to hibernation but when I came back in the evening, it wouldn't boot in the system. There were no hardware nor major software changes before that; the laptop hasn't been moved around between the hibernation and (attempted) start.

The Thinkpad starts into the default BIOS screen then goes to booting - the underscore flashes about two or three times and then the screen just stays black with nothing happening. You can hear the HDD spinning and also the HDD LED icon is lit (although not blinking as it does mostly).

I've tried the HDD diagnostics tool built in the BIOS and got this:

Pass: Controller Diag
Error code 0000: Read verification failed

Is my hard drive dead? I've been using it for a few months and worked well, no idea why it would work in the afternoon and not a few hours later without any physical manipulation in between - it has just been sitting in the docking station.
The disk - Western Digital Scorpio Blue 2.5", SATA II, 500GB

I don't want to lose the data (yeah, silly me, the last backup is a few months old)... What should I do now?

Thanks in advance!

[Harryc]

Run the WD Data Lifeguard diagnostic on the drive.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... 02&lang=en

[Czechnology]

So I need to connect it to some other pc externally, i guess..?

I've even found advices in the internet telling me to put the disk in the fridge

[Harryc]

What? Your reply does not make sense. Create a boot disc and run the diagnostic. You'll have to create the boot CD on another machine, yes.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download ... 30&lang=en

[Czechnology]

I'm sorry, if I was unclear. I didn't know it's a boot cd, so I supposed connecting the disk to some other pc over USB.

Problem is, I'm getting this error:

Unable to locate the License Agreement file, DLGLICE.TXT!!!

Please make sure that the License Agreement file is located in the same path as DLGDIAG.EXE...


Cannot load the file A:\COMMAND.COM
Insert the correct disk and Strike any key

I've googled this and it seems nobody found a fix for that
My CD contains
* DLGDIAG.txt
* DLGDIAG5.EXE
* DLGLICE.TXT
* IBMDOS.COM
* IBMBIO.COM

[Harryc]

Did you burn the .iso file as a 'disc image' ?

[Czechnology]

Yes, using Nero.

Anyway, I've finally got home and put the old vista disk in - works fine, so clearly a disk problem - and it seems that the problematic disk gets recognized in an external box. That might point to another problem I've read about the WD discs having problems to boot but otherwise looking error-free.
I'll do a backup and try to solve this somehow with the WD windows diagnostic tools.

[Czechnology]

I was able to recover most of the data (some was unreadable) but I was unable to repair the disk - chkdsk kept "repairing" the same files every time I run it and WD tools was unable to fix anything.