Hi The hard disk on my laptop appears to have crashed. The laptop starts the boot process then just stops and trries to reboot. If I try to start in safe mode, I see a list of drivers being loaded then it stops for a few seconds then a blue screen flashes on screen then the computer tries to reboot. The failure appears to happen at the same point in the boot process every time. I've tried the disk in a second laptop and get the same results so it's definitely the HD. I'd appreciate any suggestions for getting at my data. Most of the old data is backed up, but there are some recent files I'd like to recover. It's a 2.5" IDE disk, I'm thinking that putting the drive in an external enclosure may help as access to the apparently bad sectors containing the drivers may be bypassed. Am I correct in this thinking, and does anyone have recommendations on enclosures please? I'm hoping someone can help me with this. Cheers Neil
Welcome to HWF This is most likely to be a driver issue. Basically when a critical driver malfunctions for some reason, it'll show a blue screen. Connecting the drive to a different computer will definately cause a blue screen because the hardware is different. My suggestion would be to get an external 2.5" hard drive enclosure and connect it to a computer using a USB cable. Then you can get the files off the drive and reinstall Windows after putting it back into your laptop. I'm almost certain that there's nothing wrong with the drive itself, just with the software on it
Hard drive enclosure received and the hard disk is installed. Unfortunately, I still can't access the disk. If I look at the disk with Device Manager, it recognizes the device model and tells me that the disk type is unknown and the status is "not initialized". It does recognize the correct capacity. I'm not sure where to go from here, and I'm hoping you guys can give me more advice. Is there a product that may be able to go past the system information and access the File table to get my files off this disk please. I don't want to do anything that may change what's there on the disk and further damage any chance of getting any data off the disk. Any suggestions please? Neil
