Dropped laptop now receiving error message

[Ermoore]

I dropped my laptop and I am now getting a "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart" is there anyway I can recover and get all of my data and files (like papers and photos). I don't care about the computer anymore. Just want my stuff.

 

[tiny voices]

The HDD is toast. Rip the computer apart and remove the drive. Connect it to a desktop and see if you can read data off it. Hope you get lucky.

 

[smorizio]

try booting of a hirem boot cd use the mini xp boot then use a usb stick to pull the data off the hard drive.

 

[Ermoore]

Do you think the people at best but will be able to help me?

 

[tiny voices]

Do you think the people at best but will be able to help me?

Of course.....for many many many many dollars.

 

[jaguarskx]

Depending on the extent of the damage to the hard drive, you may have to rely on data recovery professionals (not best buy) to extract as much of the files as they can.

Probably the worst thing (other than totally corrupted data) is if the drive motor / read / write heads are total messed up. In that case it would be necessary to disassemble the hard drive to access the individual platter in a cleanroom (i.e. totally controlled environment), then mount it in a drive to access the data. Something like that is very expensive. Several hundreds of dollars and data retrieval is not guaranteed. Hopefully you do not need that type of help.

 

[Ermoore]

Thank y'all SO much. The laptop fell less than a foot but I'm so desperate to save all my college work I need for an eportfolio to graduate.

 

[smorizio]

have you tried smashing the f8 key and see if you can get into windows safe mode???

 

[Ermoore]

Yea, nothing happened.