A30p Hard Drive wont recognize

[desertman]

Hello all, I have been having a problem with my A30p. I bought this laptop used at a fairly reputable store in San Diego. I need to mention as well that the laptop got wet. I dried it out for a few days after this and everything seemed to work fine.

The symptom began about 3 weeks ago and now I can't even get the computer to recognize the hard drive.
It started as a very intermittent problem with the computer not recognizing the hard drive. After a few times doing a hard reboot it would finally see the hard drive.
Now it does not recognize the hard drive at all.

The biggest question is: how do I get the data off of the hard drive or is it toast?

How can I get a copy of the software and recreate the 'Product recovery partition"


Thanks

Ted

[schen]

If you have another machine available you can try putting the HDD in either an Ultrabay HDD Adapter (if the machine is an TP that will take that) and see if you can get to the data. In a lot of cases, a non-booting HDD is just a corrupted load and the data is still there. Sometimes, it's a drive going bad, but it's OK to access as long as it's not a boot disk.

If you want to see if it's the disk and not the machine going bad, you can either borrow a disk from someone with an identical model and see if it recognizes or get another disk and do the same thing. It's entirely possible that the problem was with the drive and not the machine. Hopefully, that's the case. Good luck.

[desertman]

UPDATE:

It turns out my hard drive was going bad and has now died all together (yes, with my data still on it) It is not a huge loss but its bad enough. I bought a new drive while I was in Singapore it is about 2/3 the height of the original drive but works great. Watch out for thoses Travelstar(Hitachi) drives.

Ted

[JHEM]

Watch out for thoses Travelstar (Hitachi) drives.

Oh yeah, those more than five year old used (abused?) Hitachis HDs are just heartbreakers!

[/sarcasm]

James