I think I broke my Laptops SATA Drive

MjM

Hi all! Unfortunately I think I have broken my Laptop had drive! Heres my story in all its gory detail:

I was tinkering with my systems at home and I wanted to Install a copy of Windows Vista on to my Laptop namely an Inspiron 6400.

So after a while of thinking I decided to clone my hard disk so I could get back to my Windows XP install if necessary. I eventually decided to try and run my 120GB 2.5" Hitachi Travelstar SATA drive in my desktop namely a Dimension 9200 which has SATA etc. So I shut down my laptop undid the two screws on the bottom of the laptop and pulled it out.

I gave it a once over it looked fine I might have blown a bit of dust off it and then I ripped up my desktop, I found an spare SATA cable I had and I plugged it in to my desktops SATA ports and not realising there where any more SATA power connectors I grabbed a molex to SATA adapter I had and plugged them in. Grand job I thought.

I powered up the desktop, enabled the SATA ports in the bios and rebooted and found no laptop hard drive in the bios. I thought that was strange and messed around with the SATA settings in the PC and nothing happened. I checked the drive and I found that it wasn't on as I could'nt feel any vibrations from it. So I powered down the system and disconnected one of my main SATA drives and reattached my 2.5" disk to the 3.5" disks connectors and its SATA power connector.

I crossed my fingers but there was no joy. Funny I thought thats strange. So I put it back into the laptop and powered up and I was met with a deathly silence, no hum from the hard drive and the laptop bios coluldn't find the drive. I tried a few more reboots but still no good.

So my question is Does any body no any age old remedies for hard drives? Also do you think Dell will cover the disk? The system is still under warranty! It looks like to me that it just happened to fail on me when I plugged it into my desktop! And finally how much would a data recovery cost for the disk? Its definitely not badly damaged if its damaged at all. 2.5" SATA drives can be used in desktops as far as I know! Also If dell do give me a new drive will, they allow me to get the old drives data recovered?

Oh and I don't think its solely a laptop problem but more of a hardware problem which is why I put it in this forum.

The irony of it all is that I was just trying to do a backup!!!

Ghost Train

if its not making any noise it must be a power problem.

if there are no damaged power pins on the hard drive then some components on the drives circuit board might have been damaged, in which case to fix the drive you'd need to change this circuit board with one from an identical drive

i think all dell will do is give you a new drive, not fix the old one or recover your data. data recovery is very expensive usually, but since the drive itself mightn't be damaged, only the circuit board, if you can buy an identical drive yourself and switch circuit boards, it would only be the price of the new drive. I have a 6400 myself witha 120gb sata drive, so might take the drive out and see if this looks possible

MjM

Yeah I do think its a power problem too but the SATA connectors look perfect, I was thinking about going down the identical drive route alright but I don't want to end up with two fecked up drives!!! Thanks anyway and be careful with your drive if its as fragile as my one was/is.

Ghost Train

yeah, looks possible but you'd risk fecking up an other drive, unless you really need some data on the disk probably best to just start over with a new drive

MjM

Yeah I might just cut my losses and start over, do you think Dell would give me a new drive instead? I know its kinda sneaky looking for a new drive when I probably some how killed my old one but its still a hardware failure. I don't want to have to turf out 100 bucks for a new one when its under warranty! Any thoughts on that?