HDD question

[mrmouth]

My lovely new wife dropped her laptop the other day, turned it on and the thing froze, rebooted to a drive read error message as it could not load win7. I tried a repair/reinstall and it loads the windows files from the install disc but I'm guessing that once it gets to the point where it is going to look for the drive to install to, the program just freezes. So it does appear to be trashed.

However when I tossed it in my external HDD enclose and tried to access it on my desktop, the drive is found, but not accessible. It was a gateway laptop and it shows two drives. One that is shown to be populated and labeled as system reserved, and the other drive that is empty. When I enter either, they are empty.

Am I missing something? I know gateway factory partitions HDDs, but it shouldn't show up as two drives, should it? Should I be able to see anything anyhow? Can I simply plug the drive in and expect to see anything considering it was a system drive? Any software to try?

My thinking is that if it were truly dead, why would it show up at all?

[PoleCat]

...Am I missing something? I know gateway factory partitions HDDs, but it shouldn't show up as two drives, should it? Should I be able to see anything anyhow? Can I simply plug the drive in and expect to see anything considering it was a system drive? Any software to try?...

That doesn't sound too far off to me. You would see two different drives with two partitions. One is the Boot/OS/System partition and the other would be a very small Recovery partition. I've seen this on other systems and have to think Gateway is the same.

Now if you can "see" the drive when you plug it into another system but can't access that tells me you have physical damage. If memory serves the volume info is at the head of the HDD and could be readable even if the rest is scrambled eggs.

Even if it was a system drive you could easily plug it into another system and access the files on it regardless as long as it's the slave to the master drive. You'll just have extra and superfluous Windows system files. It won't figure into the boot sequence unless you change the boot sequence to begin with that drive. This is of course assuming no physical damage to said drive....

As for software - sorry, no idea there. Check to make sure you can't access the drive first using the jury-rigging option before you try. If you can't access the data then likely additional software won't help. Good luck!

[mrmouth]

Yeah, it's dead. Thanks for the input. I needed confirmation before I recycled it