My ThinkPad has finally died! I know this is a vague question, but is there any straight forward ways of retrieving data off it? Would I have to pay a computer shop a stupid amount of cash to try?

God thats a hard one, 1 Do you know if the harddrive is still working or not. 2 are you getting another one.
right if the hard drive is dead forget it its gone unless you want to pay out a fortune.
If your getting another one the same swap the hard drive then back up to a desktop if you have one.
Problem is laptop hard drives are smaller than normal drives and have a differnt connector.:(

you can get an adaptor to convert 2.5inch drive connectors to standard IDE but if it's not spinning then don't even bother trying. if its failing after 5-10mins but spins up you could try getting an adaptor, sitting the thing on a bag of frozen peas to keep it cool and try and quickly copy data off it. It all depends on how knackered it is!
Good luck.

There are software packages that can assist in retrieving data but invariably they cost anywhere from £50 to a few hundred or more...

Unless your data is absolutely VITAL.. (read: tax return, life threateningly bad if lost).. it will not be worth your time and money retrieving it...


I've been debating offering this sort of thing as a service given the number of frazzled hard drives I've seen this past month but in all honesty, even if I was to purchase the software I'd still be charging an arm and a leg to cover my costs... it's not cheap or easy to achieve.. nor is it guaranteed to get what you desperately need...

HDD Regenerator 1.41 is supposed to work.

Originally posted by J-Blaze
HDD Regenerator 1.41 is supposed to work.
Not trying to slam you here but that's a blanket statement that can't be applied to all Hard drive failures..

I have one HD that's been so badly toasted by it's seeker head ramming and banging all over the place inside the drive that there's just no way it'd get any data out...

Mostly it depends on someone recognising there's a problem and stopping use of the drive at all... and luck in getting a retrieval utility to extract whatever usable data it can onto another disk... THEN attempting to convert the damaged data packets into useable files.

Sorry it was a brief post that needed more explanation. I was going on what you'd already said and thought I'd just suggest a piece of software for last hopes.

For me when a hard drive dies it dies. There's no bringing it back nor any trying lol.

Here's some info what it's supposed to do:

HDD Regenerator - the unique software program for regeneration of hard disk drives. The program eliminates physical damages (bad sectors) from hard disk drive surface. It does not hide bad sectors, it really restores them! ***How it works:
Almost 60 % of all damaged by bad sectors hard drives have incorrectly magnetized disk surface. Our researches have been fruitful and we have found algorithm which is special sequence of high and low level signals. These signals are generated by the software and they switch damaged surface. Even low level formatting is not able to handle this task!

***Main features of HDD Regenerator:
-Ability to detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface
-Ability to recover physical bad sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk surface
-Ability to create bootable regenerating diskette to start the regenerating process under DOS (the option is supported by Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/2003). The diskette can be used if you cannot start the regenerating process directly under Windows or if you cannot boot your computer to Windows (no operating system is installed on your computer or the operating system is damaged)
-Ability to start the regenerating process directly under Windows (the option is supported by Windows 95/98/ME)

i'm sure there's an old adage that would cover claims like that, but i'll settle for b*ll*x.

Andy didn't really say how his thinkpad has died, it might not be hard drive related at all, in which case it's fairly trivial to recover the data.

Hi again. sorry I didn't give much information about the problem. From memory, the computer runs through the initial BIOS then goes to the initial Windows 2K boot up screen. At that point it seems to stick for quite some time before coming up with a blue screen that says something about Atapi driver not being valid? Sorry I can't remember exactly as I haven't tried it for a few days. i will try again tonight, take note of the blue screen message and post more info here tomorrow. It really is a pain only having internet access at work. The problem I have is that if it is a windows fault, I can't reinstall because my computer boots from the hard drive before the (external) CD drive even though I have changed the settings in BIOS.

the hard drive is obviously not dead then.

sticking it into another pc and reading the information off it is perfectly feasible.

It could just be that some boot up files are corrupted, so it may even be possible to reinstall windows and get it all going again.

Strange that it boots from the harddrive anyway if you've changed the boot order and have a bootable cd in the drive.

Yeah, maybe I was being a bit over the top with the idea of the hard drive being dead. It does make quite an odd noise when it boots though. The cd thing is annoying because as the computer starts the little led light on the cd lights up but it just doesn't attempt to read from it. I'm thinking of getting a new laptop anyway soon. Probably another thinkpad. I assume that the hard drive connector will specific to the model?

Originally posted by Andy78
Yeah, maybe I was being a bit over the top with the idea of the hard drive being dead. It does make quite an odd noise when it boots though. The cd thing is annoying because as the computer starts the little led light on the cd lights up but it just doesn't attempt to read from it. I'm thinking of getting a new laptop anyway soon. Probably another thinkpad. I assume that the hard drive connector will specific to the model?
As Cyclone said, it's unlikely that the hard drive is actually dead then, although I wouldn't rule out that it's not dying...

In terms of replacing the hard drive you could use any 2.5" hard drive to replace it, and recovering your data from the old one would be pretty simple with an adaptor.

If you're desperate to retain your data I can see just how readable your data is and get it all copied off onto a DVD... I'd need to get hold of the drive to be sure of how bad/good things are with it though.


Your call but at the moment it's still sounding like you have a window of opportunity to retrieve your data and if you're really thinking about a new laptop then now seems like a good time or else you'll be throwing good money after bad.

any 2.5" drive should fit, laptops often have an adaptor, but this can be removed from the old drive and fitted to the new one.

a 2.5 - 3.5 adaptor is available for about £10, then you can plug the old drive into a desktop machine and suck all the data off. As Martin says, this could be symptomatic of the drive starting to fail, in which case time is of the essence.

Have you tried changing the cd drive because windows may be picking up that it isn't working. I am assuming you are using xp here.

I could be wrong but from my novice to intermediate knowledge the adapti drive is the cd - if this has failed it will show up in the initial boot sequence and stop the sequence, on a machine with windows 98 this wouldn't create a problem as it would just continue to boot up but the cd drive would not show up under my computer. However in xp, this wouldn't be the case as it checks the hardware before booting and any hardware errors can bring about this type of crash. Again I could be wrong, but it if you can get hold of another cd drive to change it, it might be worth a try.

atapi is the cd-rom extension protocol yes. But i've never seen xp fail to boot because a cd drive died.
Anythings worth a try though. You could also try booting into safe mode and or logging the boot to see if you can get any more information.

The atapi issue could be symptomatic of any number of things unfortunately...

That said... attempting to boot into safe mode (Hit F8 just after the post screen ie: before the WinXP loading screen starts up) might work and circumnavigate a bad driver file..

What worries me most is the whole "noise" issue... Ordinarily I'd suspect a bad shutdown or virus behavious corrupting key files... add the noise issue in though and I keep coming back to hard drive failing.

In your position I'd go this route.

1. Get someone with a clue about laptops to remove the hard drive and suck the data off it into a desktop machines hard drive and get it backed up onto a DVD or set of CD's so it's safe.

2. THEN run a disk integrity check to check for bad sectors.

Depending on what result you get back

3a. Run a viral scan and clean problems there.

3b. Try a new/spare laptop hard drive in the system with a bare bones installation of Win2k... Then check the CD Rom isn't failing...


If you've got virus problems then that's one thing... but if it comes down to various components failing I'd hazard a guess it's time to buy a new system or consider a new hard drive and perhaps an external USB2 caddy with a CD/DVD drive... Cost would probably run into about £100 all told for parts.. but you should factor in any labour charges you might get for testing and data recovery too...

Hope that helps give you some ideas as to what you're faced with.

Thanks for all you replies guys. I don't think it is a fault on the cd drive as it's never booted from cd first even though I set it up in BIOS to boot from cd first. I think that may be something to do with it being an external cd drive that pkugs into the pcmia port (not sure if thats the correct term).

I'm running Windows 2K (XP annoys me lots). I can get into the option page for safe mode by pressing F8 but when it tries to boot up it does the same thing. The noise is hard to explain, it's kind of a non noise, that sounds like it's just not trying to read the disk at all.

I do want a new laptop anyway, so it's not a massive deal. Losing data on the hard drive would not be the end of my life, but i'd prefer to get it off if I can. Will look into connecting it to another computer I think.

Try to use norton utilities