[Samus]

So today I dropped my laptop, took it to the repair shop they said there was a hdd failure and rec. I should purchase a new hdd.

Although this is bad - I lost a lot of valuable data - it gives me a chance to upgrade from the 320gb I was suffering with before.

So now my question. Can I just buy any hdd and use it in the laptop? Or must the hdd be specific to the laptop make? My laptop currently has a ATA hdd with it and I was looking at getting one of those 1tb SATA drives.

I have a hp g62-a29SA would a SATA drive be compatible?

[Glowbridge]

-removed-

Edit: If your laptop is indeed SATA capable then I also recommend the SSD advice below. =)

This post has been edited by Glowbridge: 16 October 2011 - 06:09 PM

[Sogo7]

A 320Gb replacement makes more sense than trying to find one with more capacity as the price hike for that extra 100 or so Gb is quite a leap. Misco.co.uk has 320Gb drives for under £40 but a 420 is around £140+ , but given that your laptop appears to have an active lifestyle a more logical upgrade would be to use a Solid State Drive (SSD).

As SSD's have no fragile mmoving parts being basically oversize memory sticks they are almost immune to shock & vibration from accidental causes. You would probably have to shoot your laptop out of a cannon to inflict any damage to the drive lol!

On the downside this technology is still relatively new and expensive so a 2.5" 256Gb SDD will set you back £350, naturally smaller capacities are much cheaper. So using one of these and regulary backing up to external or remote storage would give you a better piece of mind in the event of unfortunate accidents happening again.

[porkchops]

On a side note... if the data was that valuable you might want to consider getting a data recovery. When I worked at Staples we were able to run some software (Something Seagate, methinks) and recover data from some drives, and when that failed you could send it directly to Seagate if the drive was damaged. It won't be cheap (Was about $1k USD to send out a harddrive, maybe cheaper if you don't factor in Staples' markup), but if you REALLY need the data badly then it might be worthwhile to consider.

You might even be able to find someone with the recovery software and the SATA > USB or IDE > USB cable to do the job for a lot less.

[Renaissance-Design]

Sogo7, on 16 October 2011 - 05:06 PM, said:

On the downside this technology is still relatively new and expensive so a 2.5" 256Gb SDD will set you back £350, naturally smaller capacities are much cheaper. So using one of these and regulary backing up to external or remote storage would give you a better piece of mind in the event of unfortunate accidents happening again.

The OP won't see the full benefit from an SSD, though - it'll have to use a SATA-to-PATA bridge chip and go through an interface that's slower than 1st generation SATA (1.33Gbps theoretical maximum). Better to go for platters this time and put the cash toward the next laptop.

Edit - ignore the above. Looking at the hardware of the laptop in question, I think the "ATA" was probably a typo - there's no way a machine with DDR3 would be running off a PATA disk, it's definitely SATA. I'd second the SSD advice. I have a 120Gb in my laptop and that's easily sufficient for me; I wouldn't recommend going any higher than that. Best bet would be an OCZ Vertex3, or any other disk based on the Sandforce 2200 firmware. Looking at about £150, but it's easily transferrable to a new desktop or laptop when you come to upgrade. I personally would strip the disks out of any machine I've used for work prior to selling anyway.

This post has been edited by Renaissance-Design: 22 October 2011 - 02:07 PM

[Sogo7]

It's hard when a much beloved laptop dies. I should know having cooked off a few motherboards and shattered the occasional set of platters whilst tinkering myself. Oh the joys of custom builds with unusual security features

HDD recovery procedures in detail would fill a website all by itself however if the drive still spins up then there are about half a dozen free packages that may be able to lift some data off a failing drive. As a sidenote there are also a couple of old DOS executables that do pretty good job of sanitising drives to prevent data recovery if you happen to be selling a computer.

If however the drive sounds like a box of broken glass when you give it a shake then you're pretty much screwed. Theoretically the data could be reconstructed, there was an FBI case many years ago where a suspect cut a 5.25 floppy up with scissors and they achieved 90% recovery. Not heard of it being used on a physically damaged HDD but the principle is sound and alas likely to be hidiously expensive.

[porkchops]

Oh... this brings up another point. BACKUP YOUR DATA.

It always sucks when a HDD fails but you should never be losing key information. I'd recommend doing a local backup (external HDD or NAS) and something online. I use Mozy but they are changing their pricing structure so Carbonite will be a better deal at the end of the year.

[Glowbridge]

3-2-1 Backup solution is the way to go.

3 Copies of the data.
2 Different media
1 Offsite

[Stephen D]

Glowbridge, on 16 October 2011 - 03:26 PM, said:

-removed-

Edit: If your laptop is indeed SATA capable then I also recommend the SSD advice below. =)

+1.

Speed and reliability. At least the Intel ones seem to be generally reliable.

S

[Samus]

Thanks for all the responses guys.

I recently took the laptop to a local repair shop and they told me all I need to do is copy the data from my old hdd to a new one.

Now I was wondering, my old hdd still has all the data on it (tested it in an external drive). If I copy all the data from the old hdd to the new one, can I use the laptop as normal or would I need a new windows install or would I even need some type of configuration?

[zed]

if you do an image copy you will be fine. The worst case scenario is that you may be asked to revalidate windows.

[Angelo]

I recently bought a 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200rpm 2.5" HDD for my mac mini. Its cheaper than SSD (80GB) and it has more data capacity.
Its writing/reading speeds is about 150MB/s (almost as those on the old toshiba ssds-> 180/220MB/s).

[Black Nova Designs.co.uk]

Have they given you details on this? is the drive actually completely dead?
Sometimes this can be a series of bad sectors, which can be repaired with a HDD regenarator program, As i had a company say this to me as i was doing tests of certain companies to see if they gave false infomation around my area.

If you want a little bit more infomation please PM me.
Thanks.
Kyle.

[Georgew]

If you can still read the old hard drive, it might still be in working order with some tinkering tbh.

SSDs do have a higher failure rate than rotary ones at the moment, but luckily, when they die, they die in a read only state. So you can get the stuff off them every* time.

If they are too costly, buy a second hand 2.5 inch hard drive. The prices for new rotary drives at the minute are so high because of supply problems. (Factory and stock flooded on a huge scale in Asia). A few months ago you could buy a 500gb 2.5 inch Sata drive for peanuts pretty much, now they are £150. Second hand, just as good, still have warranty and not as costly.

[Renaissance-Design]

Angelo, on 26 October 2011 - 08:33 PM, said:

Its writing/reading speeds is about 150MB/s (almost as those on the old toshiba ssds-> 180/220MB/s).

That doesn't tell anywhere near the whole story. An SSD's seek time is whole orders of magnitude faster, especially vs. a laptop's disk which can reasonably be expected to spin down regularly for power saving.