Hard drive broken

olajonca

Can anybody help me please.my laptop broke and i took it to the computer shop and they said that the fan overheated and that it broke hardrive . I had to buy new laptop but i had photos of my daughter on the old one and was wandering whether they could be retrieved

Thank you for help

closed

what are the symptoms

if the disk is working, you could plug it into a usb 2.5" hard disk caddy costing less than £5

If it really did break the hard drive, it's going to cost £100's

penrhyn

I wonder if the OP bought the new laptop from the same shop.
Sounds bs to me, I ask for a second opinion.

Hammyman

Hmm, I must admit that "Codswallop" immediately came to mind as well. It'd certainly be the first time I'd seen it.

As closed said, get a caddy and put the old laptop hard drive in it. They're typically under a tenner. If the drive is really toast, you're looking at £400+ for proper data recovery.

macman

Even if the hard drive was 'broken' by overheating -(which sounds like nonsense), you did not need a new laptop-you simply needed to change the hard drive and reinstall the OS. That would have cost £40 plus.

JasX

Agree with all the above, you have been completly led up the garden path by aforementioned 'computer shop'. Yes its highly likely you can get the photos off the old hard drive. Your laptop should be fairly easy to fix too. If however you've let this shop get their hands on your old machine/drive chances are they've erased/overwritten all trace of them.

Hammyman

And I bet that its a classic case of "heatsink blocked by fluff" which is a 10 minute job at the quickest and an hour at the most to fix. I've done hundreds (yes, hundreds as in more than 199 ) of refurbs and repairs of "home" laptops which have all had the heatsink blocked with fluff to one extent or another. If I do a repair of a laptop, I clean them out as matter of course now. Earns another brownie point and some more free advertising, lol.

[Deleted User]

Mechanical hard disk drive failures can often be attributed to heat related issues, as they are far more vulnerable to increases in temperature than other components inside a computer, but unless the damage caused by the failed fan and subsequent overheating was spread to other components buying a replacement laptop might have been unnecessary.

olajonca

Thank you for all responces,

The sympthoms were that when i plugged it in all I could go to it a set up .

I really want my daughters pictures as I cant replace them.

Fluff in the fan was mentioned at the shop but he said i can get data back but no pictures

Mista_C

Sounds like a very dishonest shop to be frank. Speaking technically pictures are data, stored magnetically in the same way as any other data on the hard disk drive. Unless the pictures were using some heavy encryption and the rest of your data wasn't then they're talking out of their backside.

I would get the laptop back, including hard drive, and take it somewhere else. It's possible a overheat could fry the IC on the hard drive but I seriously doubt a 'fluffy' laptop would generate the kind of heat required to physically damage the drive, at least not before it cooked your lap.

WhiteChristmas

olajonca wrote: »

he said i can get data back but no pictures

Are you sure it was a computer shop and not maybe a butcher's or haberdasher's shop?

Because it sounds suspiciously like he doesn't know anything about computers...